


you used to be able to fall off the edge of the world, here

by justalittlebit



Series: whaleverse [1]
Category: Star Trek (2009)
Genre: M/M
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2010-05-09
Updated: 2010-05-09
Packaged: 2017-10-09 09:26:20
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 2
Words: 54,595
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/85688
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/justalittlebit/pseuds/justalittlebit
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Jim and Spock save the whales, Sulu's life is ruined and Pavel makes the coffee.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Part One

Most phone calls that begin with, "So, um, Chris, you love me," do not end well. In fact, a phone call that began that way has never, in the entire history of conversations with Jim Kirk, ended well. So, when this one starts that way, Chris puts him on speakerphone, hollers at Number One to bring him some Tylenol and then maybe also some whiskey. She tells him that it's three in the afternoon on a Tuesday and if he can't put up with his own kid, then he's just going to have to deal with that problem on his own.

 

"What did you do?" He asks, once he's safely settled behind his desk (and he's really getting better at not ramming the chair into the sides of the thing; yes, it's been two years but it isn't like he'd spent a lot of time prior to that preparing for a wheelchair-bound existence).

 

Chris is very patient while the whole sordid story comes out. He really thinks he should get some sort of parenting award for most of this. Other fathers probably don't get to only half-listen to their kids telling them how they've driven a woman into the Alaskan wilderness with only their - and this is an exact quote - 'awe-inspiring sexual prowess'. Other fathers didn't take in Jim Kirk at fourteen, either, though. Overall, he thinks, he probably comes out of it OK; he got Jim, and Winona and Frank didn't get to do any worse to him than they already had and Jim's mostly OK. Other things don't matter so much in light of that.

 

"So, basically, we need a new marine biologist before we leave for Hawaii in three weeks. Um, please. And Uhura and I are both really sorry. Mostly. I mean, Chris, did you see her tits? This would not happen if you didn't send such hot marine biologists."

 

Chris very manfully does not laugh, picturing the way Jim must look - he'll be on the bridge of the Enterprise, probably because it makes him feel secure, or possibly just feel like a pirate sitting at the controls of his ship. He'll be leaning back, one hand cradling the phone to his ear, and the other'll be doodling or running through his hair, moving somehow. Jim's always more restless when he has to apologize for something, and he's hardly ever still to begin with. Probably he's not alone on the bridge, either; if he's apologizing for Uhura too, she'll be next to him. The image is so vivid he can't really help but smile, and then can't help but feel lonely in his sparse office (Number One makes him keep it uncomfortable so he'll still go home at night).

 

He's never really known what possessed him, when he decided after the accident that he should start a small non-profit with environmental preservation concerns, to appoint Jim captain of his first research vessel. Or, well, he does. Jim stole two whales and someone needed to take care of them, and at that point Jim had also "borrowed" (these are Jim's words, these are not Chris' words, Chris' words are mainly profane) the ship, and it had seemed easier to just leave Jim there than to have to get him off the Enterprise and then go through the grueling process of finding someone who Chris liked and who Number One approved of.

 

Besides, Chris had never seen Jim care about anything the way he cared about the damn whales, and he wasn't going to be the person to take that away from him. There hadn't been many good things for Jim before Chris. Chris has been the kid's father for ten years, and he tries to be a good thing. He calls when he says he will and never tells Jim exactly how much the kid means to him, promiscuous, pigheaded and fucking ridiculous as he is. Sometimes, Chris thinks he does fine.

 

"Chris?" Jim prompts, and Chris realizes maybe he got lost in thought. Whatever, it's good for the kid to be a little scared.

 

"She was green, Jim. Gaila had a rare skin disorder and it made her green. I don't want to discriminate, but I'm supposed to know green is your type?"

 

Faintly, he hears Uhura yell, "Willing is his type, Sir."

 

"I get no respect, none," Jim complains.

 

"You're not off the hook," Chris grumbles, ignoring him entirely, and then looks down at the datebook Number One has left open on his desk. "But I'll let you know when I've found you someone. Probably Friday."

 

"I'll call you tonight, though?" Jim asks, because it's Tuesday. Tuesdays Jim talks to Carol which he mostly hates doing (and David, which he loves, though Chris doesn't really get what there is to say to a six month old). Chris glances down at the picture on his desk - Jim and Carol's little boy glaring at the camera from his dad's lap.

 

"Yeah, I'll be around," Chris answers, because he always will be.

 

~*~

 

Jim has always felt really bad about ruining Sulu's life, really.

 

When Jim met Sulu, the guy was twenty-two, just into law school, spending six months (after early graduation) working at an aquarium so maybe his parents would feel like they could stop helping with his tuition and Sulu could eventually afford a ring nice enough for the girl he'd been dating since he was sixteen. Jim gets that Sulu thought he had a really nice life, at the time.

 

Jim led him into a life of whale-stealing crime on the high seas. Now, Jim, personally, would think that was fairly awesome - being whisked away from the arms of your warm and loving family and really, really deathly boring semi-pre-sort-of-fiancée (he had tried to like the girl, but it just hadn't happened like that) and into a life of what was, essentially, piracy.

 

Well, OK, only for the two months during which they were actual fugitives, but still, not very many people get to be pirates at all.

 

Anyway, he knows he ruined Sulu's life and is supposed to feel bad about it. He knows that because Sulu gets drunk and tells him so a lot, and also tells him so sober a fair amount.

 

"I _liked_ Gaila," Sulu whines, from his position at the helm of the _Enterprise_. Jim knows, for sure, that he's got about ten more minutes on the bridge of his girl before Sulu starts suggesting that Jim thinks he's incompetent and giving Jim the really pissy look. So Jim is admiring the lovely view of the Alaskan coastline for as long as he can before he has to leave or risk the _Enterprise _being purposefully driven into an iceberg (something Sulu could do, since Sulu is a fucking excellent navigator, which was like half the reason Jim picked him to aid and abet his crimes).

 

"We're doing the crossing with this one and you _know_ I try really hard not to make it so people I'm stuck on a boat with for two months are not crazy. Why are you so mean to me? Sometimes it's Uhura who fucks them and you're never this mean to her."

 

"First of all, I really don't believe that you did learn your damn lesson from the last - what, _six_ marine biologists you've screwed us out of? So I kind of think you would. Also, can we go back to that? I liked Gaila but I don't like you at all and you just stay and stay and stay. And I'm not mean to Uhura because she doesn't deserve it like you do."

 

"You love me," Jim shoots back, pleasantly. He has popcorn and has decided that Sulu will not get any until he apologizes for the Uhura dig. He's totally a better person than Uhura, or at least an equally bad one. He makes sure to chew especially obnoxiously and when Sulu is well and truly pissed off Jim will tell him he used the last of the garlic dressing to make it.

 

He's not actually entirely sure that Sulu does like him. They've known each other for longer than Jim's known pretty much anyone else who isn't family and isn't Bones. But they aren't actually friends in the same way he's friends with Bones or Uhura. He and Sulu are fucking stuck together because there are some things that they did together that no one else understands, and so they'll always be friends. Neither of them has to like it.

 

"I do not love you," Sulu says. "I smell garlic dressing."

 

"Maybe you do." It'll be fine, though, because now that he's eaten the garlic dressing Sulu will eat all of the green apples and only leave Jim the stupidly mushy red ones and they'll be even. They are, mostly, always even. And Sulu would be sad if he ever stopped, Jim is pretty sure, no matter what he says.

 

"There wasn't very much garlic dressing left."

 

"No, there was not."

 

"I should have turned you down, dunked you in the damn whale tank and married Yoshiko," Sulu grunts. "Give me the fucking popcorn, don't eat my stuff, and you can stay five more minutes." He holds out his hand, and Jim gives him three kernels that he has decided Sulu deserves. "Captain."

 

"_Fine_," he says, and gives him six more. "You're gonna get fat, though."

 

He hears Sulu muttering something about how he could have had his own firm and a suit and all of the food he wanted, but he knows - because he knows Sulu very, very well whether he likes it or not - that Sulu wouldn't be doing anything but sitting at the helm of a ship now that he's done it. Same goes for Jim, which is another one of the reasons they're stuck out here together possibly for the rest of their slightly-ruined lives.

 

~*~

 

“Chris, he’s seventeen.” Jim's voice is disbelieving, and he has every right to be; Chris has been interviewing for a week and this is the best he's come up with. Chris's plan is not really to put a seventeen-year-old, no matter how highly trained, in charge of anything that means this much to his business and to his son. But it's kind of funny to get Jim all lathered up, occasionally, when he deserves it.

 

“Yes.” He works very hard at keeping his voice perfectly placid.

 

“And you think you're sending him to run light pollution studies for me during migration?” More than anything else, Jim sounds horrified that he's going to have to spend the two-month-long crossing with this kid, not that his actual duties won't be done (running light and sound pollution studies during the migration and trying to figure out what, if any, effect shipping has had on the routes of migration). Chris is fairly certain that Jim could _do_ the studies if he didn't have other things to do, so there's that. There's also that Jim hates new people, most of the time.

 

“That’d be the plan.”

 

“That’s a shitty plan. He can make the coffee.”

 

“He’s a _genius _and he'll be there in three weeks, he's really looking forward to it. Don't crush his soul and don't let McCoy do it either_._”

 

“If he’s real nice to me, he can do some filing. I can accommodate.”

 

“_Jim_.”

 

“Don’t do that voice. That voice makes me feel like you found my bong again. And I didn’t do anything wrong. You did something wrong. Find me a real one.”

 

“It’s going be a butt-ugly _nun_, Jim. And look, take this kid for me anyway, would you? He's just finished his first year of his undergrad and he's got some potential. It's only a few months and then he'll probably want to go home."

 

"Nun'll be a challenge," Chris isn’t proud of hanging up on him, but he still does it. And anyway, if Jim's not actively fighting it anymore it means Chekov'll fit in fine. He's still got six real marine biologists coming in over the next few days and two of them have potential. And Amanda Grayson's kid, because he'll either be a complete nutcase or exactly what they're looking for.

 

Later he gets an email informing him that Jim's never needed an intern before, he doesn't need an intern now, but he will take one because he is a kind and generous captain. Chris sends one back with flight details and some information about the age of consent in Alaska that he's worried that someone on board is going to need.

 

~*~

 

When Chris was in the accident, he lost the use of both his legs, and was in a coma for two weeks. Since then, he's been on Oxycontin, and both his secretary and his son accuse him of addiction. He may never walk again - Number One likes to tell him he absolutely won't walk ever again if he doesn't listen to her and get on the crutches. But he _hates_ the crutches.

 

His primary physician had been Leonard McCoy - a man who believed, very earnestly and very wrongly, that if you simply yelled enough, no one would notice your absolute lack of bedside manner, or, actually, any sympathy for anyone else at all (except, praise God, Jim, who McCoy had made his pet project - it was like an impulse, among a certain segment of the population).

 

That's not the point though. The point is, Chris was also a marine, he's seen combat. He _raised Jim Kirk. _He has _felt pain_.

 

His least favorite experience of all of the things he has ever done, and he can say this with nearly no hyperbole (though not ever out loud) is interviewing marine biologists for Jim. He stops, and sighs. Right now he has to think of Captain Kirk - Jim is his _kid_ and he gets this urge to do nice things for his kid. He recognizes that if Jim were just his employee - well, he'd keep him, Jim's a fucking genius - but he'd hate him so very, very much and hire accordingly.

 

This is his fucking eighth round of interviewing marine biologists in two years for Jim's damn ship, and he did get Pavel Chekov, who, if he grows up right, Chris can see working in the San Francisco offices - with just he and Number One and the occasional intern it's getting kind of ridiculous to run the _Enterprise_ and do some lobbying work - but he wants him out there doing something practical first. People have to love this to devote their lives to it. The boy's just so adorable and earnestly accented and it'd be great. But even he knows that Chekov can't really do what a trained marine biologist could do, even if Chris' guy at the Cornell marine biology office told him that he could. Which is why the Grayson kid with the ridiculous first name and the terrible haircut is sitting in front of him - Chris kind of knew the kid's mother when she was volunteering with Greenpeace, and he always liked her. Her husband was an ass, though, and it was a small town - Jim's friends (well, for a certain value of friends) had gone to the same schools as this one, and he'd heard the kid was more like Sarek than like his wife. And there's really no love lost between Chris and Sarek - there had been an incident over oil rights in Texas in the late eighties from which no one had ever recovered. So, the kid's here because Chris faintly liked his mom and he's run out of options, and he looks very, very good on paper. Which, when it comes to hiring for the _Enterprise_, normally means worse than nothing.

 

At least the terrible bowl cut will dissuade Jim and Nyota from continuing their reign of terror. He checks for a wedding ring and feels depressed first that he doesn't see one and second that he cares at all. Uhura is really not OK with infidelity and normally she wields some control over Jim, and besides, he has this idea (and he can _hear_ Number One and Jim telling him, in unison, that it is archaic) that maybe a married man might be more responsible, and Jim's wonderful and so's his crew, but they're young and sometimes they need someone more sober and less mean than McCoy to get some sense into them.

 

"I can't pronounce your first name," he tells the boy, honestly. "But we're pretty casual around here, so I'm not calling you Mr. Grayson. It'll just get your hopes up."

 

"Spock will do," the man answers, deadpan. Chris doesn't like him, but he is reassured that Amanda was sensible enough to shorten the nightmare of a name she gave him. And it had to have been Amanda, Sarek would have gone with something sensible and dull and_pronounceable._

 

"Tell me about humpback whales."

 

"I would assume you already know, sir."

 

Chris raises an eyebrow, because _really_? But at least this one's got the _idea_ of respect down, he guesses.

 

"I apologize. I realize the question was to demonstrate my knowledge," Spock corrects quickly.

 

"It's fine, and just Chris is also fine," he gets that he looks pretty imposing in the suit behind the huge desk. But the desk hides the wheelchair and he was called as an expert witness that morning for a hearing on whale watching in the Bay, it's not his fault. "Relax."

 

"The specific population of humpback whales which you have assigned the _Enterprise_ to study over the past two years is not one of the largest," Spock begins, looking ridiculously into the middle distance - but not like he's _reciting, _more like he's reading. "They spend their summers in Alaska, feeding, and the winters in Hawaii, where they bear their calves, but where they themselves cannot feed. Despite having been declared endangered and in fact spurring many of the original environmentalist movements, this particular population is at a very low risk of extinction at this time. This has prompted suggestions - especially from the Japanese government - that humpbacks, in limited numbers, should be hunted once more. I believe the suggestion was fifty, last summer. The International Whaling Commission was successful in delaying this, for at least two years and possibly longer. There has been little in the way of illegal whaling, but when it does occur there can be no punishment in international waters."

 

"Nice work," Chris nods. "Do you like the numbers offered on recovery of population after the moratorium on whaling?"

 

"My expertise in that specific field is limited, sir."

 

"Chris, seriously. And no it's not, this is your resume. I'm not going to judge you on what you say, as long as you can do the science, which this says you can."

 

"There has been debate over them," the boy says, not quite haltingly, but like he's deciding. Like he's not often asked for his opinion or something - with Chris' main experience being Jim, he guesses that he forgets that there are respectful young people in the world, or scared ones, or nervous ones - or whatever the hell this one is. Not that Jim hasn't been scared, he'd just never act it. "There is suggestion that the original numbers posited thirty years ago are incorrect, and so recovery is by no means nearly as complete as we imagine it to be."

 

"Yes."

 

"I do not believe enough data has been collected," Spock looks directly at him, finally. Chris appreciates that. "I would like very much to help in collecting that data."

 

"OK," Chris says - the kid knows his shit. But to get this close to his desk, they _need_ to, he always gets this much. "Why?"

 

Spock looks up at him, like he's going to ask him to clarify. Maybe he realizes he's already pushing his luck, because he tries to answer.

 

"Professionally, the research is important. Adding to our pre-existing knowledge of humpbacks could only be positive, especially if the population has recovered as we may expect some other endangered species to do."

 

"Is there anything more than that?" He can't hire him, if there's not. Jim'll fucking eat the kid alive.

 

"It was a passion of my mother's," Spock answers, quietly. Contained. Jim would've screamed it - anyone on that ship would have opened with that, except maybe McCoy, who had simply arrived one day after the crew was three months out and announced that he'd quit his job in the ER at Georgetown and he'd be on a plane the next day, and expected to be on the payroll within two months because he had child support to pay.

 

They could use this guy. The bowl cut could be useful, too.

 

~*~

 

Spock's mother had done yoga every morning, normally in the kitchen. Spock had sometimes joined her and when he was young and in one of his especially anxious phases, she had forced him to meditate six days a week, like other children practiced piano. At the time, Spock had thought it a most useless skill and had, in fact, pleaded to be allowed to take up the piano. This had eventually been allowed, but he also knows how to meditate.

 

When preparing himself for any conversation with his father, these past three years since his mother's death, he has used this skill to much better effect than he had ever used his ability with music.

 

Once he is sufficiently calm, he makes himself tea in his small kitchen (shared, until recently, with two other PhD candidates, who have now finished their own dissertations and moved on - Spock, who has been offered a tenure-track position at Berkeley, will keep the apartment). He drinks the tea, still focusing on remaining calm and absolutely nothing else (save for a moment of panic when he thinks he has forgotten to put the files he will present to his father in the bag that he will take with him). His father has, of course, sent a car. Until recently ambassador to Israel, Sarek has never liked to make use of his position or his wealth (inherited from Spock's great-great-grandfather and kept in a trust that will feed Spock's great-great-grandchildren, should he have any), but he sees the demonstration of them as some sort of responsibility.

 

Spock had been mainly raised by a woman with flowing brown hair who tried to behave like her husband's family, in their stiff, austere wealth and had - he now realizes, though as a child he had thought her the most beautiful woman alive - mostly failed and must have seemed to most others like the slightly clumsy hippy that she was, even when she had left her activist pursuits after his birth. His father, Spock thinks, must have agreed with him about his mother's beauty - he has a faint memory of Sarek brushing his mother's hair, though he can't recall from when.

 

The ride takes only forty-five minutes, but this is the first time Spock has seen his father in six months. Except for the short conversation three days ago - held mainly with Sarek's secretary - to arrange this visit, he has not even spoken directly with him in two months. They exchange weekly emails, and Sarek calls, disconcerted, if Spock is not prompt with these. Spock is not quite sure why his father is so insistent about this; Sarek's own emails are distant, sharing little information about himself and reacting only to what he absolutely needs to in what Spock has told him. Spock cannot quite bring himself to cease to communicate with the only parent he has left, though, and it does not take much time to sketch out a cursory report of the past seven days.

 

Still, walking into his father's foyer he is not, precisely, nervous (this house was bought after his mother's death, and so it is cold black marble and metals and not the warm hardwood of Spock's childhood home). Sarek is waiting for him on the stairs, and makes every effort to make Spock comfortable; he does not do very well, but Spock appreciates the effort. Sarek had paid attention to his wife's handling of Spock - especially during his homeschooling when they were on postings, and even during those rare months when they were not. As a teenager, Spock might have thought this was because his father resented the fact that Spock's birth had pulled Amanda Grayson away from a promising career, which would have been yet another jewel in Sarek's much-burnished crown. Now, he understands a little better that it was probably only that his father did not understand Spock and wished to observe someone who did. What this observation did for Sarek remains unclear.

 

He asks Spock the exact grade of the marble after greeting him, and when Spock does not know, he tells him so. That is new; even a year ago he would have been cowed, distracted, would have gone immediately to research it. The attempt to distract him when he is uncomfortable is almost welcome (the grade of marble would have been something Spock was compelled to know as a child - his mother would have researched things like that before they went somewhere new, so that he would not have to ask her, or have to go through not knowing).

 

Amanda would have said; "Do not be worried, Spock. You will always have a proud mother," and then she would have pulled him down so that she could kiss his forehead and Spock might have wrapped his arm around her waist and held her close (only he would not have, because he only did that rarely after the age of seven). He has trouble discerning what people want of him, what they feel for him and for each other – he would prefer to be told. His mother had always told him, and he has missed that certainty of place. His father has never done so, and continues not to when he tells Spock that there is dinner in the dining room and to put his overnight bag in his room before he comes to eat (it is expected Spock will stay the night, though Spock would much rather spend the week before he embarks on the_Enterprise_ in his own bed in his own apartment).

 

Spock changes for dinner - again, expected, men wear suits at the dinner table in this home, now, something Amanda wouldn't stand for without guests - and settles at the table. He brings the file full of information, and after reciting his basic thesis arguments to Sarek for what must have been the fortieth time (they both have them well-memorized, but that is not the point, it is a very safe topic) he presents it to his father.

 

"I have decided where to do my research before I begin teaching," Spock says. "I believe you met Senator Christopher Pike when Mother was working in Washington?" He waits, patiently, his father nods. "He directs a research vessels focusing mainly on humpback whales now, and I am very intrigued by his work."

 

"Was he not the instigator of the raid of that Japanese research vessel last year?" Sarek asks, because of course he knows. Every morning of Spock's life, his father has read the entire _Washington Post_. On Tuesdays, Thursdays and Saturdays he also reads the _New York Times_and often the _London Times_ if he does not have any meetings before nine. Sarek wakes at five.

 

"You know as well as anyone else that those are commercial whaling ships," Spock snaps and then adds, "Father."

 

"That cannot be proven."

 

"It hardly needs to be studied thoroughly when they have done their best to make it obvious to the naked eye," Spock says, but moves off the topic. He has to sleep here and he does not want to do so when he is seething about his father's particular brand of obstinacy; he hates the cold guest room enough as it is. "But yes, Senator Pike has been heavily - and in fact, mainly - involved in media campaigns against whaling. I will not be boarding ships armed with harpoons, I will be studying krill populations and lead levels in mackerel. I wish to emphasize that there is absolutely no violence in any of his ventures and never has been, they have engaged only through the media and have done so admirably. They were instrumental in the banning of a licensed hunt of humpbacks in the last whaling season. The ship is called _Enterprise, _its captain is James Kirk. I shall be taking a position on that ship to continue my research and the Senator's own interests in the area, beginning next week. If I could have the use of your car to get to the airport, it would be much appreciated."

 

"I have heard that name before," Sarek tells him, and a quiet woman places vegetarian stir-fry in front of both of them. They nod in thanks (Amanda would also not have with maids or at least not any who came more than twice a week, despite the fact that she could not or would not clean). "What research has he done?"

 

"It was his father who was killed in the protest at the launch of the _Kelvin_, which is most likely where you heard the name," Spock says. He has done his own research into James Kirk, since he found out where he would be positioned. The man has done no research of his own, and is mainly known for his crimes. Sarek would not be happy to hear this, and so perhaps refocusing his father will make the conversation less difficult. "Approximately twenty-three years ago."

 

"Nero was implicated in that, was he not?"

 

"You know that he was," Spock does not appreciate being quizzed. He is also concerned that his father is building an argument, the acceptance was too easy.

 

"Nero worked at your grandfather's company, you know, very successfully," Sarek pauses, chews. Spock has not yet touched his meal. "I would prefer that you do not go; there is a position available at Princeton over the summer term that I believe would interest you."

 

"I do not believe that the duty of deciding where I pursue my academic interests fall to you, Father."

 

What is truly impressive about the next two hours is at no point do either of them raise their voices. Spock manages to reject his father's offer, to make it clear that in this matter, he will make his own plans. He is nervous to bring up his mother's name and manages to avoid it. He feels it would be cheap to do so. Spock needs to contact Senator Pike's office to get to the airport a week later, but he and Sarek are loosely on speaking terms at that time and Spock does go, even if Sarek will not extend his approval so far as to lend out his driver.

 

~*~

 

Jim was kind of expecting an actual nun. There are marine biologist nuns, probably, and if they exist then Chris knows them. Or at least knows a guy who knows a lobbyist who knows the guy who gets grants for the research that the marine biologist nuns do.

 

He refocuses on the two guys standing in front of him on the tarmac of the Seward airport- well, it's dirt, but Jim's in a charitable mood. One is a child, but he’s got coffee-making hands, Jim decides. So he’ll do fine for what Jim wants him for. The other one is apparently a marine biologist (and not a nun and probably not a monk), but mostly he’s really fucking hot. Also angry, or annoyed, or just a pickax-wielding psychopath – he doesn’t actually have a pickax, but his face is so severe it’s not hard to _imagine_ one. Mostly, though, he’s hot. Kirk appreciates hot in new crew.

 

He’s concentrating on not saying any of that – Bones says he has problems thinking about what comes out of his mouth, and Bones is not normally wrong. He means to say something genius, but, of course, what comes out is:

 

“You’re not a nun.”

 

“I see now,” the child says, turning to the man (and oh, maybe it’s the accent that’s got the hot one all murderous; it’s cute now, but god knows what it’d be like after a day together on the kind of very small airplane a person takes to get to Seward, Alaska on short notice). He turns back to Jim, smiling broadly. “We were discussing why Senator Pike told us to throw you overboard, on the plane.”

 

“He was joking,” Jim says, quickly. Because it’s something Chris has been saying to everybody he sends out for nearly two years now, and it’s not funny (but he lets Chris think it is, because for two weeks once he thought Chris would never laugh again). “Jim Kirk,” he adds, belatedly, and sticks out a hand. The child – Pavel Chekov, he reminds himself – shakes it and smiles, all eager-puppy. He’ll do fine, once they break him in. Tequila, maybe.

 

The marine biologist doesn’t reach for his hand.

 

“Spock,” he does say, and nods deeply. Jim nods back because, hey, you have to be a little fucked up to want to spend your life chasing whales and yelling across open oceans at people who don't speak any of the same languages as you, anyway. He deals with the crazy, he adjusts to the crazy. He’s really adaptable with crazy (and it’s got to be better than Scotty, who has developed a really deep, intense relationship with Wonderbread and Nutella that he’s got to deal with, now).

 

The trip back to the ship - it's not far, nothing's actually all that far from anything else in Seward - is uneventful. The child is sort of sweet, in a cloying way that Jim worries he'll learn to hate (some people fit with his people and some people don't - Jim prays every day to get a sense for that so he can just toss them back on the damn plane before they make anyone any _worse_). Spock is - quiet, and odd, is all Jim could really tell you about him. He has no idea how to engage the man in conversation, which is fine, because Spock isn't _acting_ much like he wants to be engaged in conversation.

 

Actually, with Pavel speaking (mostly to himself, though whether or not he knows that no one is listening to him is completely unclear to Jim) in the backseat, and Spock staring fervently out the window, Jim has really no opportunity to start a conversation with anyone.

 

The next time he _does_ get to speak is when they're back on the bridge, and Nyota is looking at him, accusatory because, as usual, his planning skills have not lived up to her expectations.

 

“So,” Jim says. “Rooming issues.” Uhura nods. The child cowers. The new guy pokes one of the bridge consoles curiously, and then flinches away when it beeps, crackles and the screen goes purple. “Don’t worry, it just does that,” he adds. _Enterprise_ has some quirks, but she’s all his, and he’ll forgive her.

 

“Leonard,” somewhere Bones twitches and curses his mother, but it’s not somewhere where Jim has to deal with it and Uhura probably enjoyed saying it, “says he’s not sharing with you anymore because he thinks your pores ooze syphilis, so he's moved all his stuff out of your double.”

 

“That’s not how syphilis –“

 

“Works. Yes, we discussed that. He still set up camp in the single, and now it’s locked and he’s not coming out, like a very small child. I’m not sharing a room with you because you don’t understand the basic concept of laundry. I can’t share a room with Leonard, because that would be awkward after, you know, March and did I mention he won't let me? I can’t share a room with the child – I’m sorry, _Pavel_ – because I'd feel like a pedophile.” Jim doesn't question this, because he doesn't want to room with the child either and Uhura kind of scares him. “And you like to give the marine biologists their own room so as to better seduce them.” Spock looks up from where he may or may not be trying to _fix_ the computer. Jim could fall in love (or fall in tolerance, whatever). “Not you, specifically,” Uhura says. “Just generally.”

 

“Ah,” Spock says.

 

“I may still try,” Jim warns, pleasantly, though he’s not actually sure that he means it. Hot is good - but provided they can keep Spock for more than two weeks, he'll be crossing to Hawaii with them, which is long and they'd get all attached anyway, and if there's fucking it all ends worse than it would have already. “OK, so the child – sorry, Pavel, but it’s going to stick, you’ll learn to love it – can room with Scotty. He’s very small, and I’m the only reason Scotty didn’t drown in Hawaii last winter so he has to do what I say until I get drunk enough to vault the railings, which is never going to happen because I am not that stupid," Uhura looks at him like she doubts that. Which is fine. She knows him. "Uhura, tell Sulu to stay with you, if you want you can pretend like I’m trying to set you two up and you’re really exasperated. Manipulate him.”

 

“I _am_ really exasperated,” Uhura says. “Where’re we keeping Spock?” Spock had nodded politely when Uhura had tried the full name listed on his file, and she’d ducked her head like he’d cursed her out.

 

“With me,” Jim tells her, trying to restrain his glee. He has made rooming work in a way that'll drive Chris up the fucking wall (there had been some very clear instructions about Jim and the marine biologist, this time, which he kind of understands, looking at the guy; Chris is the straightest man alive, and maybe even he saw it), and he doesn’t have to stay in the grotty ‘executive suite’ with the mold that smells like the inside of a whale. He had to do that last time the marine biologist was a guy (and _Uhura_ fucked that one, so it’s not at all his fault, but that wasn’t for a lack of trying to get him to go away by any means necessary, including the use of his body). Normally, he leaves it empty and stockpiles food in there - in desperate times, he uses it to do paperwork. The smell makes him want to get out quickly which means he spends less time thinking about other things and more time filling out forms that Number One writes just to antagonize him.

 

Uhura gives him a dubious look when he reveals his _completely awesome _rooming plans. He lets her get away with that, because she knows him. Spock, though, does not know him well enough to be looking quite _that_ apprehensive about the whole thing.

 

~*~

 

His first night with Spock is maybe a little difficult. Spock folds things, Jim does not. Jim _observes_ Spock folding things and wonders how impossible this is going to be.

 

"Are you folding your _briefs_?" Jim asks, and, to his credit, really does realize that this is maybe the worst opener in the history of time really quickly, but there's nothing he can do about it once it's out there. Besides, Spock looks like he's very devoted to doing it, and the folding is even and systematic and, actually, to Jim, who is just impressed with himself when he has clean clothes, kind of heroic.

 

"I am," Spock says, and tenses up, like somehow that's an insult and not an observation, and Jim remembers the kid at the back of the class in what - sixth grade? The one who was always counting shit. He didn't make it to much of sixth grade, but he'd always figured that kid couldn't have had an easy life with the compulsion to count and the hell he got for it. Anyway, Spock's got the same look on his face that kid would get when he was in the gym and he couldn't count all the tiles on the roof before the end of the period. And so he changes the topic, because he is a good guy like that and does not poke into other people's childhood trauma, 'cause God knows he doesn't want anyone poking into his.

 

"I want to tell you what we do here 'cause I'm guessing Chris sent you out here with instructions to dump me overboard at your earliest convenience and if you got really lucky he found an energy bar in his pocket on the ride over and gave it to you for the plane?"

 

"You speak about the Senator with a great deal of familiarity."

 

Jim cocks his head at him. He knows a bit about Spock - his dad is thinking about running for the California senate, but he'd been an ambassador before that, and Spock's mom was a lobbyist or something. In the circles Spock had to have grown up in, there'd been a year when pretty much all anyone would have talked about would have been Chris Pike's stepson. Maybe the problem with Spock is that he's stupid, though Jim wouldn't have thought it. The computer isn't purple anymore.

 

"He kind of took me in," is all Jim says. "But there's no favoritism." He has to explain this to new people every time, he's stopped with subtlety. Spock nods and Jim can't tell if he's deciding which of the awful rumors he'd heard about Jim to repeat first if he does know or thinking that Jim is a product of horrible nepotism if he doesn't. Jim cuts in on this because he's heard all the rumors (the one about the president's daughter is both hilarious and _true_, though it had been in the Roosevelt Room, not the Oval Office, and he cannot for a second believe he was Julia Komacks' _first_) and the other thing's not true.

 

He cuts it with actual information about what they're doing, since he thinks maybe that'd distract a guy like Spock. Spock is going to be one of the ones who is all about the job until he goes crazy. Except for how he's not going to, because no one is going to sleep with Spock. He'll have a talk with Uhura, though he's pretty sure Spock's eyesore of a haircut (and, OK, Jim pretty much wears jeans and sweaters that Chris' great-aunt knit for him, and sometimes also hoodies or his leather jacket, but he knows that no one over the age of five should look like that) will drive her off all on its own.

 

"Theoretically, we're studying the whole population," Jim says, before he can get derailed there. "But that's stupid. You know humpbacks are generally solitary?" Spock nods. Well, maybe not criminally stupid. "OK, good. We follow three who like to stay pretty close together. Two of them - George and Gracie - were in captivity in San Francisco for a few years, you probably heard about the daring rescue, so I'll skim over that." Again with the nodding.

 

He has to tolerate Spock, but not like him well enough to fuck him. He can work that.

 

"Then there's Red," Jim grins - he kind of can't help it. This might be how grandparents feel, it would explain why Chris kept buying David ridiculous shit that Carol probably wasn't even opening because she had this deranged idea that David isn't going to get spoiled. "He's two and a half now - he was born six months after we got them out, our first day out with a full crew actually, which was awesome. It was pretty fucking cool actually. George and Gracie's baby - there wasn't much publicity because we couldn't really muster it at the time. You have no idea how much fucking work it takes to get reporters interested in happy whales. This'll be his first migration on his own, and he'll stick pretty close to his mom, but not that close. Same general route, you know? Same goes for George and Gracie, though they'll stay far enough apart that we'll only be on one at any time. Probably Red, mostly."

 

"Why specifically the youngest specimen?"

 

"'Cause I like him best." He really _does. _Red's kind of fucking awesome - also, Jim named him and thus feels an attachment (this is Uhura's theory). "Anything else you need to know."

 

"The location of the galley," Spock answers. "And how much vegetarian fare I can expect on board." Jim answers that and guides him down to the galley. Spock's exactly as boring as he seemed, maybe. That could be good.

 

~*~

 

Spock is trying to be a good roommate. He is finding it necessary to try _very hard_. He is trying very hard because the person whose socks have wormed their way into his bed and who is currently up at five in the morning having a loud argument with someone in San Francisco is, technically, his boss, has been for two days and will be for at least eight more months (two on this crossing, four in Hawaii, two on the crossing back). Even if it is something no one seems to recognize onboard, it is the kind of small detail that Spock likes to keep in mind. Also, the room smells - the entire ship smells, but anything belowdecks is _worse_ and the small, windowless bedroom was nearly unbearable at first.

 

Spock likes Nyota, though; they’d talked, his first morning, over coffee on the bridge (Spock is still getting accustomed to the cramped spaces belowdecks, and Nyota follows him). First, it was all strictly business – her expertise in linguistics and his own training in biology, what they wanted from this mission, and what precisely the mission _was_. And then Nyota’s hands had curled around her mug and she’d grinned at him.

 

“If you’re going to be this formal all the time,” she’d said, neatly arranging her feet under herself on her seat, looking more comfortable than it should have been possible to be on cracked vinyl, “we’re going to kill you within a week.”

 

“Oh?” He’d found it best, even less than a full day in, to simply wait for the punch line. It always came. And he had not been (still is not), entirely aware of another way to be - these were business acquaintances, like his labmates in his graduate work. There is no other way to act around them; nothing in his experience has taught him how to act with a coworker who does not expect professionalism, and so that is what he presents. He suspects, ultimately, he will have to learn something else, here.

 

“Yeah,” she had answered, “we’re kind of like family. Except we’ve all had sex.” She had been disturbingly frank, but he had found he liked it. “Well, no one’s slept with Hikaru.” She'd considered this. “Yet. Probably. The captain’s sneaky.”

 

Today, their second morning, it is already a habit; Spock forms his habits easily, though it is rare for them not to be solitary, so he has no way of knowing she will be there. She is not, when he arrives, as he decided half an hour into Kirk’s most recent phone call that his concerted effort to fall into a coma was useless, and he might as well attempt to do something productive; he has barely explored the labs which Kirk had pointed him towards two nights ago. Chekov, who was operating on either no or very little sleep, had already made coffee when he had arrived in the galley. For this, Spock is devoutly thankful.

 

“I asked Sulu,” she tells him, without greeting him. Today she is in a long white sweater and pants that he’s almost entirely sure belongs to Kirk (Uhura has assured him that it would be worse than sleeping with her brother), and he spares a thought for the fact that she is gorgeous. He then thinks about being a professional and misses what she says next.

 

“Pardon?”

 

“He says he blew the captain in a supply closet once, but I’m not supposed to tell anyone who might tell Pavel because Sulu thinks he’s got a better chance if he seems like he’s not that kind of girl.” Spock blanches. Pavel is _seventeen_.

 

~*~

 

Jim thinks Spock probably feels isolated. Everyone feels isolated when they first get onboard. It's a thing, and the only person he's really seen Spock talk to a _lot_ is Uhura, who seems to like him and keeps trying to get Jim to get to know him better. Jim tries to get Spock to speak to him while they're both in bed, because it's not a very big room and Spock can't exactly get away at two in the morning. And even if he doesn't precisely like Spock, Spock's still theoretically his crew and deserves kindness.

 

"Go to sleep, Kirk," is all he gets.

 

He still tells Spock all about the last time they all went ashore together, including what happened to Sulu behind the bar with the guy who whipped out a sword (which kind of threw Sulu off his game, since his entire game consisted of being the only guy in a bar with a sword)_and_ how Uhura and McCoy had disappeared for six solid hours together, and could not realistically have spent the whole time buying groceries (this was in _April_, so they can't even blame it on March when she had just been broken up with for being too distant and it was Joanna's birthday so Bones had no self control anyway). This doesn't work. So then he drags Spock down to meet Scotty.

 

Engines are _cool_, and Spock has to have been a six-year-old boy at some point, even if Jim cannot actually in any way imagine what that might have looked like.

 

Scotty, though, does not prove an especially good match. He provides detailed schematics, which Jim understands because Chris gave him a quiz once on the running of this ship and he studied hard, because he had _wanted_ this, and Spock understands because Spock definitely isn't _stupid_. Spock looks interested in those.

 

"And this," Scotty says, grinning, and gesturing to one of the larger structures of the engines,” is my darling." And then, _of course_, he sticks his hand into the fucking oil, _again_, and spatters it all over Spock, who looks deeply offended.

 

"He doesn't understand people," Jim says, ushering Spock out. "I don't actually know why Chris hired him, because somewhere there are probably sane engineering geniuses who have been blacklisted. I'm really sorry. You know where the showers are."

 

"It was interesting," Spock says, when Jim has walked him to their door, and is on the point of leaving to go and remind Scotty that _Jim_loved him, but really, he was a very hard person to like, and he was going to have to try harder if he wanted not to be sent down to the engines to stay and never allowed to see sunlight again. "I appreciated the effort, Kirk."

 

"You can call me Jim, you know," Jim says, finally.

 

"You have a very informal family," Spock tells him.

 

Aside from thinking Spock was hot (something he thinks he's maybe over with the whole _knowing Spock_ thing in play), it's the first time he's ever thought anything nice about him. Spock's doing this great job of pretending not to know who Jim is, but he has to know, and he_still_ called Chris his family.

 

He's about to turn to leave when he remembers his last little warning. "Um, Scotty's also probably going to spend some time hazing you. Mostly the child, because I sort of told him I was handling you, and then he got all excited about making the child think the ship was haunted. I thought I'd warn you because, you know, he's not a normal person and his pranks can get really elaborate and just come to me if he does anything really inappropriate and I'll make him stop." Spock looks scandalized, and then nods.

 

"I hope I will not have to."

 

He's maybe good people, in the end. Good, deeply boring people covered in oil who is never going to be able to respect Scotty again.

 

~*~

 

Six days in, Jim has decided that the child can start doing some filing, because he makes _fantastic_ coffee. It’s like an orgasm in a mug. Also, he gets up to make it at three in the morning in case anyone wants it, and Jim should not have the power to make a person that terrified of him. So he gave the gift of filing. When he left the kid, he was drawing up comparisons of the Dewey Decimal and Library of Congress systems and outlining them to Sulu, who looked oddly fascinated, and Scotty, who looked amused.

 

Bones has been hiding out in his new room for nearly a week. Either drunk, depressed or just trying to make sure that Scotty doesn’t move all of his stuff in the three minutes he takes out to go complain at Jim on the bridge. There have been no cries for help so far, and Bones normally won’t come out of a good sulk for eight days at the least. Jim’s going to leave him to find his own way out until day ten.

 

He has also decided that it’s probably not good for Spock and Uhura to get so close. She’s letting him call her by her _first name_. Jim’s held her hair up while she puked _nineteen times_ and beat up her ex-boyfriend and _painted her fucking toenails when she broke her arm_ and he doesn’t get to do that. Either she and Spock are going to get married or they’re going to mutiny, and he doesn’t like it.

 

This is why he Spock-naps Spock. And it’s not really a Spock-napping so much as an invitation out onto the dinghy to, you know, do his job and observe whales with Jim and tell him things about them in an official voice. Plus, anybody who works on Jim’s girl needs to get to know his babies.

 

It’s fifteen minutes of sitting on the dinghy and trying to make conversation before anything even happens. They cover the weather. They cover the fact that it is cold in Alaska again, because it’s probably worth repeating. Spock grew up in Arizona. This is an area of small talk where Jim tends to run into trouble because what’s he supposed to say? Iowa, but that sucked way too much to talk about with new people, because child abuse is not the great conversation starter you think it is. Jim figures anything is better than admitting that his issues have issues and the only reason he’s even here is that an old friend of his mom’s took pity on him and then kept him. Which all ended in the_liberation _(he resents ‘stealing’ for reasons he feels are legitimate and Chris feels reveal his Communist leanings) of a couple whales to try to impress everyone, and then he had to hide in international waters for a few weeks, and he just sort of never went home again, because he’s an ass. And even though any conversation that starts with his childhood is going to end up there, and that he doesn't mind, it's the starting with his childhood part that makes him feel like he's drowning. Spock turns away, maybe because it sounds like Jim doesn’t want to get to know him.

 

“You don’t snore,” Jim volunteers, an awkward minute later. He wouldn’t mind the silence if there were something to fucking _do_ but Gracie’s taking her sweet time today. It's her he wants Spock to meet, since Red's bumped up against the dinghy before and that's not a great first experience, and George is a reticent bastard when he wants to be. “So that’s good.”

 

“I do not intend to get revenge for any of your pranks.”

 

“It was only the short sheeting,” Jim argues. It had been an attempt to make Spock _get_ interesting, and also, he had told Scotty he would try something.” Everything else was Scotty and you can't say I didn't warn you.” Spock opens his mouth – probably to question Scotty’s sanity, because everyone does, until they realize that if it weren’t for Scotty being insane, the damn ship wouldn’t stay up. But he closes it, abruptly, at the first movement of the water. “There’s my baby,” Jim murmurs. Spock says nothing.

 

It is Gracie and he's fucking certain he'd know her just from looking, even without the receiver in his hand telling him so. Uhura says he’s sentimental and Chris says he’s broody, he just knows that he’d _know_. He tells Spock as much, and Spock ignores him completely.

 

He can respect being a little freaked out by the whales, and anyway, they probably deserve it. Gracie’s his girl, and he was a little scared the first time he got up close and personal with her (granted, Gracie smushing him into a pancake and his getting arrested were about equally probable at that point).

 

“Pretty fucking cool, right?” Jim asks.

 

“Yes,” Spock nods, eyes still where Gracie went under.

 

“So, let’s talk about taking care of her,” Jim says, and then starts in on light pollution studies and water measurements and krill populations and ninety things he wants Spock to do that should take a staff of at least six and maybe fifty, but they’ve got to make work with Spock and the child, Jim’s spare time, Bones if he’ll consent and Sulu if he’ll behave. Spock looks intrigued.

 

Jim decides he could probably be persuaded to actually like Spock, even if he is boring as _fuck_. He likes Jim’s babies and he hasn’t complained too much about _Enterprise_ being held together with spit, duct tape and willpower, and Jim’s got low standards.

 

~*~

 

Spock likes it here, he’s decided – he likes coffee with Nyota in the mornings (he treasures the small ritual of it, never having known anything like it before), and his room does not smell as bad as it once did. This is because for reasons of his own that Spock can only hope have something to with respect for Spock's own habits, Kirk has taken to doing laundry. Or he has simply become accustomed to the smell. The notion of that nearly horrifies him. He writes his father a letter halfway through the second week. He writes about the frustrations of the ship and the small problems of living on it. He refrains from writing about the absolute wonder of going out on the dinghy with Jim or the fear-anticipation-hope of setting out to follow a whale across the ocean for no other reasons than that it’s _interesting_. His mother would have liked that letter.

 

He tells Nyota about the letter he might have written his mother, he's hushed when he does so. He can't say why he tells her, only that the first few lines of it have been flitting through his mind since he sealed his father's and he only wants them _out._ She grins at him. Then she tells him he has a lot more in common with the captain than he thinks he does, and that his mother sounds like a woman she might have liked. Very few people did not like Amanda Grayson, and so he says that he agrees.

 

They all call Kirk captain, like it’s his title, like it is something that Kirk has enforced even though Spock is nearly certain that he never would have. He does not seem a needlessly vain man, and that would be a needless vanity when it is already so clear that they _do_ defer to him, are loyal to him in an endless sort of way that Spock does not precisely understand. Kirk is in charge, even if he nearly never emphasizes that, and he’s certainly knowledgeable enough to merit some respect. When he was fifteen, he read the Senator’s thesis on the legalities of the murder trial of George Kirk. He knows who James Tiberius Kirk is, and he knows enough about those who work under him to know that none of them could not do the job that Kirk does, and perhaps with more expertise if not with more inherent _skill. _Spock believes that there are only a very few things which cannot be learned, though, and while Kirk might be very good at his job, others could be as well.

 

So their respect has nothing, in his mind, to do with knowledge or passion or skill (though that does exist, certainly, all in a puzzling abundance), and everything to do with this attachment to Kirk that Spock can't quite grasp onto.

 

So, he calls him Kirk, and Kirk accepts it, if he even notices it. Nyota looks a little betrayed every time he says it – she calls Kirk captain, except when she’s mad, and then she calls him Jim. Pavel, who follows the man around like the puppy he so much resembles, looks horrified, and Dr. McCoy always glares at Spock, furious and unhappy, and steps closer to Kirk.

 

He’s contemplating this, standing on the deck of the ship and looking out across the water – George is around somewhere, they think, though he hasn’t had his hands on the receiver for their radio tags since that morning when Mr. Scott had made off with it. Spock likes the whales, and everyone else is preoccupied with various projects, so he felt his time would be best spent observing them. Kirk and Nyota, he knows, have been on the phone for an hour, alternately cajoling and threatening in the interest of getting some repairs on the ship done that the Senator can’t afford but they probably need if they expect to pass any sort of inspection in Hawaii.

 

But that’s over with, apparently, because just as there’s the disturbance in the water that means George will be up in a few seconds, Kirk lands hard on the railing next to him.

 

“Fucking assholes,” he grumbles, then “hey, boy,” to the massive eye peering up at him, from far enough away that Spock feels only scientific inquiry, not the nervous wonder of his closer inspection. “Hi, Spock.”

 

“The funding is not readily available?”

 

“There’s a thing where people think that these guys’ll be fine on their own, or that I should just clean up my own messes, and then Chris has it in his head that if they're talking to the people doing the actual research they'll have all these _feelings_. But he forgets that most people who aren't him who care about this think I'm basically a terrorist and hate me,” Kirk says, and runs a hand through his hair. There is a scar on his cheek, faint and perhaps only from acne - but the line of it is smooth. Spock looks away - investigating others' scars never does him well, always leads to questions he does know better than to ask and his mother had always told him that that was the sort of information others preferred to volunteer, no matter how badly he wishes to know it. “But not your problem. You’re not here for the politics. You’re counting tiny shrimp for me.”

 

“I am doing that,” Spock answers, “among other things.”

 

“How’re the tiny shrimp going?” Kirk asks, and Spock answers. Kirk looks fascinated, briefly, and then starts tapping his fingers impatiently on the railing. Spock stops. “So no change, yeah?”

 

“No significant change from last year's counts,” Spock corrects, automatically. Humpbacks feed largely on krill - Kirk's 'tiny shrimp', and the numbers have been steadily decreasing. They can support this population, but very little more.

 

“I don’t know if I like that,” he answers, finally, thinking slowly. “Gracie’s probably not pregnant?”

 

“I do not think so, but my expertise in marine biology is –“

 

“I understand,” Kirk nods. “I trust you on it; that’s fine. I just worry about them getting enough to eat - I know it's crazy but I swear Red should be bigger by now."

 

“I do not understand why you insist on calling them by name,” Spock finally says, having nothing to contribute to the discussion of funding and nothing more to report on the topic of krill. He majored in biology, his master’s degree is in marine biology and he has never had to ask for money in his life.

 

“No,” Kirk says. “I guess you wouldn’t," Spock does not flinch, though he nearly wants to. "Shit, I'm sorry, that must have sounded awful. I'm not actually an asshole. Um, it's just - you get really attached to them when you're out here for long enough and also really socially deprived and awkward and when I don't have Uhura around I offend people all the fucking time. And you know – you must know how they got out here.”

 

Spock does, but still, he nods deeply and then says, “Tell me.”

 

“I was twenty-one and I was fucking stupid – I was living in San Francisco and kind of doing really nothing with my time because Chris couldn’t get me clerking for anyone else and I wouldn’t go to school. Don’t ask me why, I can’t really remember now.”

 

Spock doesn’t know much about Jim’s childhood except the basics he knows about the situations of his birth. No one does. The Senator had announced, one day ten years ago, that he’d taken in a fourteen year old boy, and he hadn’t allowed any more discussion about that. Kirk avoids any talk of the time before he was adopted by Senator Pike and is skittish of any conversation that might require him to speak about events before he was in command of the _Enterprise._ He will simply leave if there is any hint of a question about his life before he was the Senator’s ward . Spock has no notion of what he is and is not supposed to know - so for the time being, he will pretend to know only what Kirk tells him. He cannot say that his mother taught him no diplomacy - only very little.

 

“So, there was this aquarium, and it wasn’t too far from the house and there’s only so much one person can drink when they’ve got a federal senator and his security breathing down their necks to you know, obey state drinking laws. And so I started going – and that’s where I met Sulu. They had George and Gracie, this tiny-ass tank, and you know as well as I do that they don’t live in groups in the wild. Love ‘em and leave ‘em, right, boy?” Kirk is addressing the whale, who has gone back under anyway; it is ridiculous. Spock very nearly regrets asking about this. But then Kirk sighs, turns soft, a little earnest. “I think they conveyed exactly how much it sucked, in the press. Which, hey, not complaining because I’m not in federal prison right now and Chris is better at this shit than I am, but even I know public sympathy was kind of a huge part of that. But I don't think anybody mean to hurt them. They just – they cut a lot of corners, and they always said they were going to free them, and then they _didn’t_. They’d had George and Gracie for nine years when I started going, and Gracie was going to have a baby, and you know how far they get in a day here they had nothing when they were there. Spock, I can barely float and I could get across their enclosure in about ten minutes. The water was treated and it was disgusting, and they had taken in two lost calves and they would have made a performance of the baby, if they'd even been watching closely enough to know that there was one.” Kirk stops. “It’s gonna sound stupid if I tell you this, but I don’t think you like me so –“

 

“That is untrue,” Spock objects. He doesn’t dislike Kirk; not really, he just doesn’t like him as much as everyone else seems to.

 

“Well, anyway. Chris is the kind of guy who tells you to do the right thing, and I’m really thickheaded – maybe you noticed. Anyway, so I just – I did the right thing. I got them out, and I got them safe and then there was a lot of talk about arresting me, which is how I got stuck out here. I’d rather be – well, I’d rather be stealing whales.”

 

“Why do you stay here, then? I was under the impression you had been cleared of all charges.”

 

“That’s what I’m telling you,” Kirk says, and then looks out. George is on his back, white stomach showing. Kirk smiles. “They had a baby, you know? They had Red and he’s just fine and I _did that_. I can’t leave. And they need names because I know them, and if you can know something it can have a name.”

 

Spock nods, again, lacking any other real response. Kirk is not lying; he is a transparent man. There is devotion in his eyes, like a father speaking about his most successful child.

 

“But you did know that, made the national news and everything,” Kirk smirks. “Tell me if he does anything new and, you know, have fun counting shrimp and testing mackerel. Oh, did I tell you you needed to go fishing? I wanted some chemical counts. Chris emailed you about it a while ago, fishing shit's in the storage off the lab. Have fun and let me know if you need anything.”

 

Spock cringes at this idea, but remembers that it is his job - he will perhaps, simply wear gloves and try to think about something other than what he is doing, as what he is doing will be highly unpleasant.

 

He could, possibly, tell Kirk that it is against his own moral code, he believes that Kirk would listen to him and would make alternate arrangements. But he does not want that, he wants, oddly, to do what this man expects of him.

 

Spock _had_ watched the news, in his mother’s hospital room. She had cheered for the Kirk boy, and laughed, and had said to Spock that there are still some heroes in the world. That’s not why he came here – he hadn’t known it would be James Kirk on this ship when he submitted his application to the Senator. There is a fleet of three now, and an increasing reputation - his position here was coveted and so he had wanted it for reasons other than that it might have pleased his mother. He doesn’t know that he’s really glad that it was. But he knows now that, just a little bit, he agrees with her.

 

~*~

 

The night after Jim accidentally spills his heart to Spock on the deck because Chris expects him to do the fucking impossible or possibly make it rain money if he can't make people who hate him give it to him for free, and that feels like groveling to Jim and it makes him tired and angry and punchy, Spock starts a conversation with him for the first time. Well, not really. Spock has sought him out before, to show him something or ask permission to use the satellite phone or arrange to go ashore or use the dinghy for something. But - he's never done this before.

 

Jim had resigned himself to quiet nights, when he slept in his cabin, which fucking _sucked_, because he hates quiet right before he falls asleep and he's pretty sure that Spock would kill him for playing music or bringing Bones over or something.

 

"I have a question," Spock says to him, in that same ridiculous Spock tone where there's really nothing but perfect enunciation. If Spock told him that he was getting married, joining the army and was also on fire, Jim's pretty sure he wouldn't even get _louder_. He gets heard, though. It's a skill - Chris has it, too. Jim does not. Jim likes to shout, though. It makes him feel like he's getting shit done when he's the loudest guy in the room.

 

"Yeah?" He rolls over, and Spock's looking right back at him. He gets the idea that Spock's been looking at him for a while, eyes boring into the back of his neck, which he'd thought he felt, but had brushed off. Jim always thinks he feels people watching him when he sleeps. It's one of his things. For the first six months he lived with Chris he'd locked the door to his bedroom every night - Chris, being Chris, had gotten him four locks and given him all the keys to make him feel better. Jim had liked that, the power of being able to lock and unlock the door and let people in when he wanted to, not just get out of the house and hope nobody came looking when he didn't want people to get near him.

 

"Why were you never arrested for your theft of George and Gracie?" Jim kind of appreciates that Spock's using the names - though he doesn't say them right yet. Though, again, Spock says everything the same.

 

"They never actually wrote a law that specifically says you _can't_ steal a whale," Jim starts, because he feels a little squeamish about this one every damn time it comes up. Favoritism didn't get him this job, but it did get him out here in the first place.

 

"I am fairly certain that most would take it as read that you are not meant to, though." He thinks that _possibly _Spock was joking just then, which would be a fucking miracle. Or maybe he just thought it was possible that Jim hadn't cottoned on to that one yet.

 

"Well, yeah, that's kind of where I got into trouble," Jim grins. "But the ownership papers were never _perfect_, right? The Cetacean Institute just sort of scooped them up when they turned up in the Bay when we were kids - do you remember it on the news? They tried to get them out for a while. My brother got really into it," he stops there. He's not entirely sure Spock knew about Sam, before that. Not many people get to. He's not actually entirely sure why he let himself say that, or even if he did. Sometimes stuff just comes out of his mouth, but not often _that_, not when he's sober. "But they drew up the papers _after_ they built the enclosure, which was too fucking small, something everyone figured out after they noticed how _big_ humpback whales actually are."

 

"Something that I believe they would have noticed originally."

 

"More impressive next to the Golden Gate Bridge than some sixty year old tourist with blue hair," Jim answers, quickly, though that's actually always a question he had, too. George and Gracie could barely turn in the thing that had been built or them and he loses a little faith in humanity every time he realizes he was the first person who did anything about it. "But anyway, so they might not have owned them to begin with, the water was public, and half the reason I got them out of the damn enclosure was because there was some major negligence on the part of the director the institute. Also, they hadn't fucking noticed that Gracie was pregnant, which was pretty ridiculous."

 

"And you had?" Other people would sound impressed.

 

"Her giving birth was kind of a hint," Kirk shrugs, and then tries not to, because he's still lying down. Spock's looking at him, wide-eyed and interested. Jim had ducked down to the lab two days ago and seen Spock eying a sample like that. He's trying to decide between being flattered a little worried about dissection when Spock makes this weird sound in the back of his throat that on a normal person (a category he has decided Spock will probably never fit into - which is fine, it means he fits in here) would mean that he should keep going.

 

"So Chris," he makes his own little sound. He _hates_ this part. He'd rather have spent the rest of his life floating off the coast of Hawaii with only Sulu and three seasons of _Grey's Anatomy_ for company than have had this next thing happen to him, OK? And that had been a really shitty month (the second month, Chris had sent a care package, it had contained other DVDs and had been like a gift from god) . "Chris talked to some people and made some points, and they agreed not to press charges, and the police agreed that maybe it could have eventually happened by accident because the Cetacean Institute was for shit at maintenance on the tank. I know it was unfair and that it shouldn't work like that and I swear to fucking God I would never, ever have asked him to do it but he did it anyway. He's really fucking stubborn like that."

 

"I do not see why you would be angry," Spock says, and he looks up, suddenly, examining Jim in that same hard-scientist way of his. He knows he sounds like another one of the spoiled Senate brats they'd probably both gone to school with, who'll probably inherit the damn seat and get crowned despite the fact that his mistress is hanging off his arm. Those kids had always been getting away with shit like that, but Jim hadn't _been_ like that. He knows it looks bad, though; there are people who didn't talk to him anymore, after that, the people who had had the _ability_ to be one of those kids and never had been. Jim bets Spock is one of those; Jim knows his dad is a really big fucking deal, and Spock doesn't act like it, ever. "Senator Pike obviously simply recognized that you are of far more use here than you might have been doing jail time for your crimes."

 

Jim really doesn't know what to say to that. That sounded like maybe the beginnings of having something positive to say about Jim and there is no way that should make Jim feel quite so accomplished.

 

"Nyota told me that you were given the grant you had requested," Spock adds, finally, like he needs to fill the silence. Jim can appreciate that, he'd been about to say something really ridiculous. "She said that it was mostly your doing, and I wanted to tell you that I was surprised, but gratified."

 

He has no idea if that's a compliment or not, and he can't decide how he should take it. One of the major boundaries between him and liking Spock is that Spock is more confusing than any ten other crazy people put together.

 

"Why the fuck does everyone else get to call her Nyota?"

 

"She says that it keeps you - I believe her phrasing was 'on your toes'," Spock answers, and then closes his eyes. "I am going to sleep now, Kirk." 

"Yeah, night." Jim tries not to feel offended that Spock still calls him that, but can't quite muster it. 

~*~

At some point after the grant came through last week, it stopped being that Jim could be persuaded to like Spock, or that he tolerated living with Spock since most things were better than rooming with Bones. It started being that he’d look for Spock.

 

_Enterprise_ is a beauty, but she’s not big, so it never takes much looking. Spock only goes ashore when he needs something (though Jim keeps telling him to savor their last few days in Seward), and the only place they’re not badly stocked is science equipment, so he doesn’t, much. The lab’s shitty and it's meant to be a pantry or something, but it’s there. 

 

In a former life, the _Enterprise_ was a whaler, and Jim gets melodramatically drunk sometimes and talks about her doing penance with him. Generally, that’s about when Sulu or Bones slaps him and he gets over it.

 

But anyway, he looks for Spock. Bones is a doctor, his job is in noticing, and he notices everything Jim does, including the looking-for-Spock.

 

“Don’t fuck this up, Jimmy,” he tells him, sounding for all the word like someone’s _father_ – well, he is, but that’s not the point. Sounding like he thinks he’s _Jim’s_ father and Jim’s mostly got enough of those for a lifetime.

 

Jim’s maybe a little drunk. In that whales are predictable they’re thinking they’re taking off sometime in the next three days and so they'll all be at sea for at least a month and probably a bit more, which means _now_ is pretty much the only time he can be drunk for a while, which means he _is_, because, whatever, maybe alcoholism’s the only family tradition he’s got. 

 

“M’not gonna fuck Spock,” Jim says, and then gestures a little wildly before grabbing for the bottle of bourbon, “He’s all… pointy and bony and shit. Plus, prolly he’s doing Uhura. _Nyota_.”

 

“Eventually, you’re going to have to get over that she won't let you call her that.”

 

“Not _now_,” Jim slurs. “'Nother round?”

 

“Yeah, another round,” Bones answered, then, “but, really, Jim. You’re not going to fuck him and scare him off when he finds out you’re the king of all the assholes? Because you don't have the best track record. Neither does Nyota, but I think she fucked the guy last winter as a favor to me more than anything else. Man had two years of premed and he was fucking insufferable.” 

 

“Think I might be your boss, you wanna talk t’me like that?”

 

“It’s my job to make sure you don’t die, you’re not the boss of me,” Bones sighs, and then takes the bottle out of Jim's hands. “You have the alcohol tolerance of my seven year old _daughter_,” he adds, and then pours for both of them.

 

Jim does the shot, and puts it back down, and nods to himself because Spock is all pointy and you wouldn’t _want_ to have sex with him. You know, at all, ever. It’d be bony and weird and also he’s a fucking good biologist, so there’s that, and you know, _less fuckable than one of the marine biologist nuns _(who would still, Jim thinks, be a little fuckable. Like, if it was a dirty marine biologist nun who wasn't quite so sure about her vows anymore and just wanted to experiment, and, OK, he was going to have to start watching less porn). 

 

~*~

 

Except Spock’s _not_ less fuckable than a marine biologist nun, he’s probably actually considerably more so (even, possibly, more so than the porno ones). Well, except in that he’d probably toss Jim overboard if Jim tried even a little bit, and if he didn’t Uhura’d do it for him. Uhura says that she wants to keep Spock.

 

Jim’s actually pretty sure they’re planning mutiny rather than marriage at this point, which he kind of likes but he doesn’t want to think about why. 

 

So, yeah, that’s why he’s in Uhura’s quarters painting her toenails again even though her arms are just fine, and he only did it the first time because it was _kind of_ his fault that the protester hit her with the sign, even if he would have taken the blow for her, if he hadn’t been in Norway at the time. It’s not his fault he had to delegate and she got marching around Capitol Hill all day complaining about things no one on Capitol Hill can actually bring themselves to care about because, except Chris, they’re mostly assholes. Though he can’t shake the feeling that it was a little bit his fault. 

 

But, anyway, that’s why he’s there. Because they left two days ago and they’re on the fucking ship for however long it takes Gracie to catch up with them, since she'd stopped at what was possibly a humpback whales singles bar in a cove a few miles back and Jim wants her closer than that. It’s not like Gracie dawdles, but it’s _far away_, OK? And Red’s all little – in that whales are ever little – and _slow_ and shit, and Jim’s actually more interested in sticking with him, though he hasn’t gotten far yet. He worries about Red, which is stupid, because Red’s probably about as smart as they come – but he was raised around people and boats and mostly thinks that boats are there to play with him. Some of them aren’t and that scares the hell out of Jim. 

 

There’s actually almost nothing for Spock to do during this part of their voyage. He is observing, which mostly involves sitting around their room and reading and stealing Kirk’s books but making it look like he asked so that Jim can’t even ask for anything in return. Also, theoretically he’s examining mackerel, but he told Jim that the most he could tell him based on what they had in the ship was that they _were_ mackerel, and also that fishing was a barbaric practice and he was never doing it again. 

 

So, yeah, hiding with Nyota who will only let him into the room on the condition that he does stuff for her. And he’s crap at cleaning and didn’t want to anyway. And this is – well, he’s good at it. And if Bones ever asked, he did it because there was sex at the end of it, somewhere (this will be a lie, and everyone will know it, but maybe this'll be the time Bones allows him his dignity). 

 

And so he sits, and he paints Uhura’s toenails, and he considers regretting being born. He actually does tell her most of this, and she just laughs at him – which is a gorgeous sound, and she is also gorgeous, but Jim has _rules_, and one of those rules is that he can’t sleep with Uhura. It’s a good rule.

 

He’s got to make a rule about Spock. 

 

“The thing,” he tells Uhura, who has tugged him up on to the bed with her now that he's done with her nails – she’d grown up in Kenya, and generally doesn't approve of Alaska, and is a much more tactile person in the summers when it's less than boiling outside, and he doesn't mind. There's a certain something to be said for cuddling someone who would sooner kill you than fuck you. Low pressure or something. Also, she smells nice and cleans her sheets a hell of a lot more often than he does, and if he angles right and pitches his voice low she might fall asleep before he does, and he’ll get to sleep here. “OK, no, seriously, woman, move your knee.” She moves it back into his thigh. “Thank you. The thing is, that Gaila was really good at her job, but she was here like a _week_ and she scared Scotty and you hated her anyway.”

 

“I didn’t hate Gaila.”

 

“You told me you were only surprised she hadn’t fucked George when you found out about us, but fine,” Kirk sighs. Uhura has this talent for being just as awful of a person as everyone else is, but making it seem like she’s not by being you know, wonderful at everything, and remarkably undamaged for a person who chooses to sequester herself on a boat with a bunch of crazy men for four months of the year. “But, you know, Spock’s awesome. You’re in love with him –“

 

“I am not.”

 

“Stop contradicting me, I’m in charge of you.”

 

“One phone call and Chris would let me push you off the boat and take over, and I would if you weren’t so warm.”

 

“Oh, baby, you have no idea,” she hits him, but she doesn’t have the leverage to make it hurt, and probably wouldn’t anyway. He uses that line at least once a week in the summer.  “But, Spock. You like him and Bones puts up with him, which is better than nothing, and he _tried to fix the ship_ all those times before Scotty tried to kill him for touching his private subroutines in the bad place or whatever it was –“

 

“I know you know how code works. Stop pretending to be a moron, you don’t need to.”

 

“But I think Scotty secretly liked it,” Jim continues. “And I think Hikaru likes him. You know what it’s like with Hikaru, but remember the girl with the – you know, the one with the thing, and then the incident where Chris fired her for maybe trying just a little bit to kill me.”

 

“She tried to kill you and you can’t remember her name? I hate you so much, Kirk.”

 

“OK, no, we don’t reward people who _sleep under my bed for two weeks with a knife _by remembering the minutia of their lives.”

 

“No way you can prove she had the knife the whole time.”

 

“Well, Hikaru hated her. And the child's in little geek love with Spock, and I like the child. Thus, I want to keep Spock. So, no Spock fucking, right?”

 

“There’s also that Spock’s not interested, just as something to maybe think about a little bit.”

 

“I’m _Jim Kirk_.”

 

“Look, I’m sorry you’re having baby’s first moral dilemma, but you already know what you have to do, so I can't help. Now could you stop being such an _ass_ so I can get to sleep so you can go back to whatever it is you do with your time when you're not being a pain in my ass?”

 

“You have to help me, Uhura. It might be your job - you're supposed to do press stuff for us and what if I go crazy and call the New York Times and, I don't know, say something really awful?”

 

"No one would pay attention to you, Captain." 

 

Uhura pushes him off the bed, then, which ends in him yelling at her, and then Scotty’s yelling at the wall that if they’re going to do _that_ they don’t have to do it next to _him_ and also that he thought Uhura had better taste. It takes Jim forever to get comfortable again and even when he does Uhura’s planted her elbow firmly in his side and it hurts more than most bar fights, so it's not as good as before.

 

He tries to fall asleep, and is only mostly successful.

 

~*~

 

After the third time Spock is chased away from the computers on the bridge by an enraged Scott, he gives up. This creates something of a surplus of time for him, which he has no notion of how to fill. Theoretically, he documents the process of migration, the slight divergences of route, and anything that he notices being eaten along the way. But he hasn't seen anything worth noting yet. He will have a report to write in the weeks after they arrive in Hawaii on the migration (though, at the moment, it will be mostly a list of computer components they will need and conversations he has had with Jim about studies they could do if they could recruit another marine biologist to the ship - Pavel is very enthusiastic, but Spock is not comfortable leaving him on his own, and so he does not count). His other research cannot be completed until he has been given access to the better research facilities in Honolulu. He finds this all not quite dull, because it is all new to him, and thus something to be examined. He is also not quite interested. Spock feels a need to be interested at all times; if he can't be doing something, then he will start to think, and that is something he wishes to always avoid. 

 

“I hate this part,” Nyota tells him, one of their mornings. No one else is yet awake, and she is, as usual, nursing her coffee while he simply observes. “Everyone else loves it though. Leonard will get us all down for physicals within the week, Hikaru does fancy things with the rudders, Scotty can do whatever he wants to the engines as long as the captain doesn’t notice the ship stopping. It’s a little wonderful, I guess, for everyone else. I don't really get to do anything - I mean, supervise, I guess, and send official emails when the captain gets too punchy to do it . I'd rather get to go onshore, sometimes. And I can't hear them _sing_, Spock.” She had told him once, grinning like she was telling him a secret, that that was her favorite part. He can understand why she would miss it - Spock himself does not find the song appealing, but he knows that many do. The equipment onboard, however, is not capable of picking up their sound as they travel at the speeds necessitated by migration.

 

Spock is not pleased to know she is equally bored. He had hoped that Nyota might be able to tell him how he was supposed to entertain himself. He has been through Kirk’s collection of novels in the past week, for simple lack of anything better to do. Kirk has oddly sophisticated taste, for a man he’d been led to believe had been essentially raised in a barn, even if their choices in literature would perhaps never be the same.

 

His physical with McCoy reveals nothing more about what he is supposed to _do_ now, the doctor grumbling about his heart rate and his temperature and a million other things that aren't at all wrong. He has never been to the small office space the doctor has by the galley before – the room is messy, medical equipment for humans mixed, seemingly at random, with tools Spock has searched his small lab for. He makes a mental note to come back and get them. The task of reorganizing his space to account for an _entire microscope_ which is clearly his and not McCoy's will take up at least twenty minutes if he draws it out and consults Nyota and possibly also Kirk.

 

On one wall of the doctor's office is a corkboard, and when Spock is done cataloguing the things that are rightfully his littering the space, his eyes fall on it. It is mostly covered in drawings – the unskilled hand of a very small child, and Spock supposes the child is the girl whose picture is accorded a place of honor at the center. Next to that is a list, seemingly compiled over years, in many different hands – he recognizes Nyota’s, as well as the doctor’s scrawl and Scotty’s careful capitals from reports he has read.

 

“That list,” he asks, pointing to it with his chin and McCoy takes his blood pressures yet _again_. He is beginning to doubt the good doctor’s competence, “What is it?”

 

“Doctor-patient,” McCoy starts, and then abruptly cuts himself off. “Fuck it, he’ll let me anyway. List of the captain’s allergies. Boy’s a delicate flower and he should be living in a fucking bubble, but, no, he won’t do that. Don’t eat almonds in his presence and if you even _say_ pineapple I swear I’ll make you administer the epinephrine yourself.”

 

“It is an extensive list,” Spock comments. “It seems unrealistic.”

 

“Most of them just make him unhappy – would you stop _moving_, I can’t do my job if you’re squirming like a child,” Spock, who did not feel that he had been moving, endeavors to be still. “Only,” McCoy squints, “Six of them or so are likely to actually end him. List’s been around since he was fourteen and I added something last week, before you ask.” Spock had not been planning on asking, but it is informative.

 

“May I ask,” Spock says, a little bored with the topic of Kirk’s allergies, though McCoy looks as if he might be willing to continue for hours, “what will you do to amuse yourself once you’re done with your examinations?” He does not mean to sound sarcastic, but it comes out that way, and it is not actually _contrary_ to how he feels about the man, so he does nothing to correct it.

 

“Once I’m done with my physicals, which you need because all of you are children and can’t feed yourself, so don’t take that tone with me,” one day, someone will have to tell McCoy that he is only three years older than Spock, but Spock has decided that this is not going to be that day and he will probably not be that person. It’s not his problem, precisely, if McCoy is deluded in small ways.  “But once I am done, this - that's gonna take about two more days because I have to lure Scotty into the sunlight - then I get to spend at least three weeks trying to stop Jim from having an anxiety attack every time he sees another boat. I’ll be done the physicals about the time we hit international waters,” McCoy sighs. “You’re bored now ‘cause everyone’s bored now, but once we’re near whalers? Jim’s not gonna _let_ us get bored.”

 

Again, Spock does not understand, but he nods. The feeling has becoming worryingly familiar.

 

~*~

 

Spock realizes that his inquiries have reached a the point of prying, but he does _need_ to know now what it is he's supposed to be dreading so acutely. As does Pavel, who seems to be walking on eggshells around everyone else, having been warned, perhaps, of whatever vague horrors await them just as well as Spock has been. Which is to say; very poorly, and just enough to make Spock wonder if he has mistakenly joined a cult, as his father so loves to suggest. Nyota, normally his best source of information, simply shrugs. 

 

"It'll make the captain look bad if I tell you what he did," she says, "and I'm usually all for that, but this time he doesn't really deserve it all that much. He's a good guy, he just cares too much, you know?" 

 

"You are frustrating in the extreme. I assume you refer to a specific event and not simply another of Kirk's eccentricities?" he asks her, and she laughs. 

 

"I'm telling him you said he has eccentricities, and yes. Ask him about it, if you want," she sighs. "I know you don't like him - and don't you tell me that's not true." 

 

"It is not," Spock says, struggling not to sound petulant. "I believe we are becoming friendly." And he does in a way, though perhaps he suggests it a little more than he feels it for Nyota's sake. He certainly enjoys Kirk's company a great deal more than he might have predicted, but that does not mean he is devoted to the man in the same way that she has been.

 

"God, you have no idea how to make friends with people, do you?" She asks, and then pecks him on the cheek. "Sorry, I had to. But he likes you, just so you know. Nonsexually even, maybe. I don't know. It's so rare that that happens that I always forget what it looks like at the beginning." 

 

"And you were concerned I would think worse of him if you revealed why you all seem to expect next week to be the worst of my life? I am also perfectly capable of making friends, I am _your_ friend, am I not?" 

 

"I made friends with _you_, but yes, you are," she says. "Also, he was eavesdropping just then so I needed to call him a manwhore. I have a quota." Spock, who hadn't noticed Kirk, raises an eyebrow at her and glances back to the open door of the bridge. Kirk is retreating down the stairs. "I can _sense you being a creep,_" Nyota calls after him, and Spock imagines he hears Kirk punching a wall, but decides that no grown man could possibly do that, in reality. 

 

Spock despairs of her, and goes to the engines to find Scott. He can’t say that he likes their chief engineer – well, only engineer really, though as with most things, Pavel shows a talent for it – but they do share a certain respect for each other’s talents, and the chore of keeping Kirk from actively interfering with their work when he decides to fix something he perceives as broken. Scott, so far as he can tell, suffers from really no compunctions about what comes out of his mouth, and with some subtle guidance in the correct direction will pour forth whatever information it is that is needed. This is, possibly, why he only seems to know about one thing. Spock heard McCoy suggest once that Scott was not, in fact, aware of the whales. Sulu seemed to have taken this idea surprisingly seriously. Spock has also given it some thought. However, the man is an integral part of the ship. Everyone else has a story of coming here. For all Spock knows, Scotty grew in the engine rooms. It would explain his tendency to touch things that no one else is willing to go within three feet of. 

 

It does not take much effort on his part to get the information he wants from Scott, only a suggestion that Spock has become nervous about whatever it is that Kirk is supposed to do next (it is not a lie, he could become nervous, and in the way he phrased it, he could just as easily have been referring to Pavel; Spock does not like to lie, when he has he has always needed to focus on the lie, and it has been harmful).

 

"It was not," Scott says, "pretty. You understand how the laws work about fishing in American waters, yeah?" Spock nods - for once, actually understanding what he's referring to. "Good, 'cause I sure as hell don't. What I do know is this; we get a foot out of American waters and the captain's up in the bridge every damn day for at least a week, exhausts himself and everyone else doing it, too. Last year - well, actually this is sort of funny now, though I, personally, would not mention it to the good doctor. He'd shit kittens. Again." 

 

"I shall keep that in mind." 

 

"Well, anyway, we're about two days out, and Jim's got this thing going with our marine biologist - that's important. Sweet lass, too, I've always wondered how he drove her off, thought she might actually keep him." 

 

"Is that relevant?" As easy as it to steer Scott onto a topic, it becomes nearly impossible to keep him there with any degree of accuracy. There is a slight chance that Spock will get an entire biography of James T. Kirk, as told by a man who smells of engine grease constantly and only goes out into the sunlight when forced. There is a small part of him that envies that ability to veer completely away from a thought without meaning to. Spock's own thoughts, set out and orderly, must come to a conclusion once he has allowed them to root themselves in. He wonders if Scott's easy distraction might be easier to bear. 

 

"Not yet, no. But captain's been up there two days, and McCoy's doing his nut, yeah? Captain's not eating and he's not drinking and he keeps telling us that if it's not him in charge then someone else could get blamed, which is ridiculous, you know. We'd never let him take the blame, y'know that, should anything happen to the bairns out there." Really, Spock has always wanted to ask Scott for specifics on the bairns - a term he uses to refer to George, Gracie and Red as well as to the engines - but he suspects the man could give them only in a deeply general sense, and that they would come to speaking about the engines again. "I hope you wouldn't either." 

 

"I would not," Spock says, and is surprised to find that it is true. Not that he is entirely sure where this blame might come from - but he would not be willing to let Kirk take it on his own, not when he is beginning to understand that while this ships lives or dies with Kirk, it rises and falls with his crew. He is not truly a part of this, yet, but nothing here could happen without some contribution of his. He supposes his attachment to this place should be troubling, but it has been such a smooth process that it cannot be. 

 

"So, McCoy finally tells the captain he's gonna sedate him if he doesn't at least get out of the damn chair and get breakfast - this is the morning of the third day. And Carol - she's the pretty biologist captain's got on his arm, yeah? - Carol gets right on it, too. And Nyota's there, but she's just tapping on her cast and making sad little faces at him which seems to work as well as anything. He loves that girl, you know that? They're sort of sweet. Would make lovely children." 

 

"Is that relevant to the story?" Spock sincerely hopes it is not. Though he thinks he might know Nyota too well to take a truly romantic interest in her, the idea of her and Kirk together still sets something off within him. Perhaps it is the idea of the change coming so suddenly, in such close quarters. He gets distressed by things like that - too much small detail comes at him all at once, in those situations. Moving - as they did, frequently, in his father's years as ambassador - was always hellish.

 

  

  1. "Well, no, but it's still true. But what happens is, the captain gets up, and I suppose he hadn't been drinking anything - at least, that's what McCoy said later, and I've no reason not to trust him - and so he goes down. Absolutely out cold and he hits his head off the console to boot - dents the damn thing and it takes me a week to get close enough to sort it again, because then he's kicked them all out and he's locked himself in, and by the time they've got Sulu up to pick the lock - why he knows how is utterly beyond me, but he does and there's that to be thankful for. Anyway, they all get in - bairns were fussy so I couldn't be there for much of this - but he's got himself all set up and doesn't move for five more days after that, even. And he eats but only because there's the Senator spending a bloody fortune on the phone to make him, but it's a wonder that he ever got up again, I'll tell you that."  
  



 

"Did he ever explain his actions to you?" Spock asks, because he himself finds them utterly inscrutable. And he is beginning to believe that he can read Jim better than he might a simple acquaintance. 

 

"Wouldn't say a word of it once he'd got back to sleeping and eating and walking about. Senator called us all up and told us that if we asked he'd have us fired and he didn't give a damn about the bias of it, he'd make it stick. Suspect it has something to do with the captain's mum or whatever it was that happened there - you know the Senator isn't his dad, don't you?" Spock honestly believes that Scott lives in some sort of other reality, ruled mainly by gears. But he cannot examine it at that precise moment. 

 

He feels, at least, slightly more prepared, if completely puzzled over how this has really anything to do with him. 

 

~*~

 

They’ve barely strayed out of international waters when he finally truly understands why this is such a burden on them all. They’ve been out for four hours and Kirk seems to know this _exactly_, though how Spock can’t be entirely sure – knowing the man, he might divine it. The first hour was – tolerable. The second hour, Spock was on the phone to his father’s secretary trying to convince the woman that he was who he said he was. Kirk speaks with the senator at least once a day, in his capacity as the captain of _Enterprise_, but once a week he makes a simply personal call. It is a habit Spock is trying to emulate, but his father seems to be trying to make it difficult. He suspects that brief but frequent calls will be less painful for both of them than the drawn-out rare ones they currently have. The third hour, Nyota told him that it would be best if he stayed below decks until McCoy's screaming had stopped and Kirk had finished any rebuttal he could muster. The fourth hour he ventured to the bridge, and instantly regretted it.

 

Kirk is piloting – not unusual, when there’s no funding to be gotten, or observation to be done, or obscure phone calls to be made in the middle of the night – but he has a death grip on the wheel now, and he’s staring straight ahead instead of trying to engage whoever is closest in conversation.

 

“There is _no one there_, Jim,” McCoy is saying (his voice slightly hoarse from an earlier period of what Spock would not hesitate to call hollering), “we can _see _territorial waters. We may be in them, for all you know. Please calm down. Please, don’t make me sedate you. I like to save it for special occasions.”  

 

“First, you have really no excuse to sedate me right now.”

 

“When I’ve got the goddamned senator breathing down my neck ‘cause I near let you die for the second time in two years, can we maybe talk? I like my balls attached and you were adopted by a terrifying man who cares whether you live or die, Jim.”

 

“In his defense,” Scott puts in, from his seat in the copilot's chair, “I wouldn’t say the captain nearly _died_ so much as embarrassed himself in front of the pretty lady biologist and knocked his head a bit when he fell down.” 

 

"That totally got me laid, actually. Carol was into me showing my _weaknesses_," Kirk answers, sounding petulant but still glaring determinedly forward. 

 

“Carol thought it was _manly_ how dedicated he was,” McCoy sighs. “Is that the problem? Are you trying to get _laid_ right now? If I find out you've been going after Uhura again -”

 

“_I can have other motivations_,” Kirk’s voice is tight and he still doesn’t look at McCoy. Spock is constantly amazed at how unprofessional these people are. His crewmates, he supposes.

 

“And what motivations might those be?” Spock says, walking in. McCoy gestures for him to leave, frantically, and he does not. He really doesn’t quite trust the man’s medical abilities, and Kirk seems less than likely to listen to McCoy no matter what he does or says next. Scott nods at him.

 

“There are,” Kirk gestures broadly, “people. You know, bad people. Whalers. And they’re _out there_.”

 

“And they will leave if you are physically in charge of the _Enterprise_?” Spock knows, intellectually, that it is ridiculous to reason with him – though a part of him suspects that Kirk is perhaps adding some theatricality to his anxiety about this, just enough to make himself a caricature of anxiety rather than a portrait. He understands that the man must genuinely feel it, though, to show it. Kirk would not inflict so much worry on anyone for the simple pleasure of it, or if he did not feel some need to. He is a good enough man for that, and Spock has learned to respect that much in him. But perhaps he adds to it, Spock thinks - so that instead of appearing to be scared, worried, careening desperately out of control, he can make himself comical in his need to be in charge. There, perhaps, Spock is projecting. It is worth taking the slightest chance that he is not and trying to help.     

 

“No,” Kirk says, “but, hey, if I’m up here anyway I might as well be driving so that Sulu can go flirt with the child. You should all go watch that –it’s pretty pathetic and I think the child thinks Sulu’s preparing to cook him or feed him to a great white or something.”

“Jim, I’m not distracted,” McCoy snaps.

“Smells better up here and the engines don’t need me at the moment. Aren't there other things you can be doing, sir?” Scott answers - he sounds as if he is trying to be of assistance, but does not know what the purpose of his inquiry is. Spock suspects Scott's attempt at comfort (if that is what it is) will not help.  

“I’m the Captain?” Kirk sounds nearly unsure, but he still has not actually turned away to look at any of them. McCoy is looking at Spock in wonder and Scott is distractedly gazing out the windows, only half there at all again. 

 

“Normally at this time of day you are observing either the behavior of the whales or my experiments, or reporting, or, since it is Wednesday, calling the Senator.”

 

“Chris has a doctor’s appointment,” Kirk explains, his voice still an octave higher and significantly more exacting than his normal near-drawl, “George and Gracie are both five miles out and I’m not getting closer right now without driving into a rock that’s not gonna like us much and Red’s behind anyway so there's nothing to observe, and I know for a fact that whatever you're doing you don't want me to see it because I came in yesterday and you shoved it all under your desk like it was porn." 

 

The fact that Kirk does not take this opportunity to make a more specific lewd joke is actually worrying. And Spock maintains that he had done no such thing - Kirk had shocked him, and he had not wanted to reveal what he was working on to Kirk until it was completed. For some reason, the idea of the man finding flaw in his work distresses him, and so he had wanted to devote the time to the research into sound pollution as compared to migration routes before he presented it to Kirk. He had completed it late the night before, and was in fact quite pleased with what he had done. 

 

Spock has always been incapable of anything but pride in his work. His desire to show only his best work to Kirk is no more and no less complex than his desire to show his father his most impressive artwork at the age of four had been.

 

“And all that? Only makes him _worse_,” McCoy moans. "If we could see the damn whales he'd only be about half as crazy.

 

  

  1. “Then allow me to sit and tell you what I have been doing,” Spock says, ignoring McCoy entirely. He seems to have stopped trying to calm Jim and started having some crisis of his own, which does not particularly interest Spock.   
  



 

“You’ve been telling me that fish are fish and then complaining about the lab until I fall asleep, when probably you look at your secret porn,” Jim says. “And I’m _sorry_ but we blew all our money on Coast Guard refuels and tequila so I can’t get you the microscope you want. Fuck – what’s that?”

 

“A _cloud_, Jim, it’s a big, scary, cloud,” McCoy says. “See how he’s crazy?” he turns to Spock, who nods. This time, though, he does understand; it's refreshing in its rarity. 

 

“He is unusually invested in his work,” this doesn’t show that Spock might _admire_ Kirk for his devotion, which is exactly as Spock had intended it. “Which is why I believe rather than nagging him we might do better to distract him by telling him how to make more use of his time.”

 

“I am _not a child_ and _do not need to be babysat_. I also don’t need ridiculous armchair psychology,” Kirk says, but he does turn towards them to shoot a dirty look, though he immediately turns back. McCoy sighs, and steps back from where he’s been directly behind Jim, staring out at the water as if it had done him some wrong.

 

“I have a _degree_ in psychology,” McCoy says, as a parting shot, and then leaves the room. Scott is still staring out the window.

 

“You fainted?” Spock asks, settling where McCoy once was, though he doesn’t rest his hands on the back of the seat as McCoy did, instead locking them behind his back. Parade rest is not exactly a natural way for him to stand, and he still feels – after weeks – as if he is always going to fall. A part of him wants to assign more meaning to this body language, to think of when he has done it before, when he will do it again. He does not, though. Now is not a time to become stuck (though the tension in Kirk's shoulders holds an equal potential for fascination).

 

  

  1. "It was mostly dehydration, so now I have water.” He waves a bottle, indignant. “I learn from my mistakes.”  
  



 

“I see,” Spock looks out, then looks at Kirk’s hands – since McCoy has left, they have tightened on the wheel again, the knuckles standing out in stark relief. His hands are callused as Spock’s never are – Spock works with delicate materials, and types everything rather than handwrite it . Kirk pulls ropes and puts on scuba gear and writes everything in a small, cramped script he transcribes onto the computer only when he is forced to. Spock stops this track of thought quickly – his tendency to get involved in small things will not help him now. 

 

Kirk, Spock realizes, does not know how to stop thinking about his own minutia, in this case. Spock feels that pain keenly. He doesn’t, however, know how to say that, though he is almost certain that if he did know how to fix it he might be a happier person, himself. 

 

“I wanted to tell you,” he says, brisk, firm and businesslike, “about the comparisons I have been running with my _copious_ spare time, between the precise routes of every animal that has been tagged in the past fifteen years, and I’ve cross-referenced with what data has been made available to me on noise pollution, if you’ll allow me a moment to get out the charts that I’ve made, I think you will find that there are certain changes which cannot be ignored.”

 

Kirk nods, and turns to look at him again.

 

Spock feels oddly accomplished an hour later when Kirk agrees to leave to eat lunch with him, giving Sulu the wheel, if only for the forty-five minutes it takes them to eat. And follows Spock to his lab for the hour afterwards that it takes to compare three minor trends to the southwest off the coast of Washington State to the routes of several major shipping companies. That night, at dinner – Spock has been forced into the galley by Nyota, though he normally prefers to eat on his own – McCoy nods at him, once, deeply and almost respectfully as the doctor gathers up dinner, presumably for the captain who could only be kept from the bridge for so long before he began to gnaw his knuckles in a way that looked truly painful.

 

“Not gonna be really impressed until you get him into bed, though,” he growls as he leaves.

 

“That’s what she said!” Pavel cries out, high and painfully young. Sulu finds this improbably hilarious, and Spock is disturbed enough by the depth of Sulu's infatuation that it catches his thoughts up completely.

 

~*~

 

Jim's a self-aware guy. He can admit to some crazy. He can admit to the way the very idea of being outside the reach of much of the law - while it once might have made him happy beyond all belief - now makes him cringe and grip the wheel and become, in Uhura's words "the worst nightmare of a boss anyone's ever met". There's this feeling, then, and it does go away, that he's the only thing standing out here, the only thing that has real meaning and is really doing anything. There's the International Whaling Commission, but they're fucking impotent and everyone knows it, so in a way he kind of is. This all just makes him feel desperate, clawing, like he's the only damn thing standing between something that's _his_ and it's destruction. Jim's never had many things; he wants to keep the ones he has. 

 

He gets that he makes people cry and he gives himself headaches and he's probably about two years away from an ulcer, and if it's not his it'll be Bones' because, well, Jim's a father but McCoy is someone's _dad _and lacking Joanna he'll use Jim. So he does also admit that his crazy can effect other people and that it's maybe something he needs to eventually do something about. He's just never really wanted to. It works for him, it gets the damn job done, it keeps everyone safe.

 

One of Chris' therapists once told him that he was so used to holding the world together with two hands that he couldn't bear to let anyone else hand him a string to stitch it up. He'd reported this to Chris, who had sighed, muttered something about the failure of the entire medical profession, and then had sent Jim back to him anyway. There had been a lot of therapists, for a year or so there, and that one had actually been one of the better ones. Not as good as the ones who came later, after Chris' accident, because Jim figures that managing to get him out of the hospital room for long enough to bathe probably shaved a few weeks off all of their lives and he probably should give them some credit for that.

 

So, yeah, point is; Jim Kirk, he's kind of fucked up and he mostly knows it. He's lucky because Chris always got it and always accommodated it. He got to Chris when he was fourteen  and Chris was the best thing that ever happened to him - still is, probably always will be. Chris is pretty much the only person he's ever let be in charge when he could have just done it himself. Chris gets how to hold it together and do what Jim wants and then sometimes also what Jim needs and Jim loves him for it, so much. No one else knows him well enough to try to help. And he was never a kid who had anyone to miss, but he does miss Chris, now. Jim wants to be calm and he can't quite find it, without Chris who was always the guy who could pull calm out of his ass in the worst situations ever. There's this memory Jim has that he hates, where Chris was freaking the fuck out about four weeks after he woke up, and Jim had been getting coffee, or some shit, and he'd walked back to find Chris just sitting there _sobbing_, and he'd had no fucking clue what to do with that. 

 

"Real men cry," Chris had said, the moment he'd noticed Jim, "Now we're never speaking of this again and get me a fucking tissue." Jim had cried like that before, and he wouldn't have been able to stop for fucking anything. He needs that, sometimes.

 

Now there's Spock, though, and he's not Chris because no one could be, but he's taken the crazy in stride - actually, Jim's pretty sure Spock's never taken anything in any other way. He had nodded as if accepting this new state, and set himself and his laptop up next to Jim wherever Jim happened to be since that first time on the bridge. It was _strange_, but not strange like he had thought he could expect of Spock. He likes it - he and Spock had been on their way to a friendship before, but now they _are_ friends and even if Jim still has to hide with Uhura to keep from hitting on Spock sometimes, other people have bigger problems in their friendships.

 

Spock doesn't try to soothe him - he doesn't do the Chris thing where he points out how ridiculous Jim is, and he doesn't threaten him back to normalcy like Bones tries to do, and he doesn't baby him like a million social workers and tutors and therapists have done, and he doesn't try to just sit and _feel_ with him or whatever the hell it is Uhura's trying to do before she gets exasperated and taps Bones in, usually. Then, when Bones gets exasperated, there's Sulu, who stares at him, despondently, and then feeds him until it's all over. Sulu gets it, but in his pragmatic that's-a-great-idea-Jim-but-we-don't-actually-_have_-a-helicopter way and won't try to fix it anymore. 

 

Spock just - well, he waits it out, and he talks about what he wants to talk about. Once he pointed out that it was a ridiculous waste of resources to pay Sulu if Jim was simply going to do his job for him, but when Jim had let Sulu have three hours after that, it never came up again. He doesn't chide Jim into eating, but he leaves for the galley around lunch with every expectation that Jim will follow him.

 

Jim could not, to save his own life, tell anyone why he does follow him.   Spock can barely make a sandwich, and Jim ends up scavenging Scotty's leftovers, since Scotty can make food out of pretty much anything  (and after the Great Almond Incident of Last October and the subsequent three days of Bones not speaking to Scotty, everything's really helpfully labeled). Spock's good conversation, though he'll still only talk about work and he talks about it like it is work - yeah, work he's interested in, but it's sort of clear that it's not his life. Jim remembers, faintly, something in Spock's file about him having a tenure-track position waiting for him at - Berkeley or Princeton, whichever one Chris hadn't applied to for Jim when they'd been in that phase of both their lives when they'd thought that Jim was going to go to college and not commit any more felonies. This isn't Spock's life. This is maybe the beginning of a research paper that'll make him a name. 

 

Jim gets how smart Spock is. He's surrounded by geniuses (Uhura speaks a ridiculous number of languages, if Bones hadn't spent the first six months after his divorce drunk he'd be the youngest chief of surgery in Savannah General's history by now, the child's apparently a prodigy with more than coffee_, _Scotty can make electronics do his bidding with pretty much a thought, Sulu was the one who figured out how the fuck you even steal a whale - well, the detail parts, anyway). He's surrounded by geniuses, he has testing that tells him he could be one if he'd just put some muscle into it, and he's still ridiculously impressed by the way Spock's long, elegant fingers trace over a map and by the correlations Spock draws and by the mathematic equations Jim finds tucked into one of his own books, marking Spock's place when Jim steals it back. He's impressed, by all of that, when he's impressed by nearly nothing else.

 

He's pretty sure this is what most people call being smitten, but he hasn't got anyone to ask, and he has more important things to think about, anyway. Well, he has Uhura, but she's a very mean person and giving her ammunition before he _needs_ her is like emotional suicide, which he doesn't need right now.   

 

If, on the third day after they enter international waters, he wakes up thinking that he might take an extra hour in bed, that everything's probably going to be fine, and he still crawls out and up to the bridge before the sun is even properly, really out, he doesn't need to tell anyone that, and it's not as manipulative as it looks. He would have been out there most of the day anyway, and if it gets Spock out of bed and sitting next to him rattling off three theories about light pollution in _conjunction_ with noise pollution Jim's pretty sure he is making up as he goes along, then no one can ever prove that was his intention.

 

And besides, even when he doesn't feel like he _needs_ to be up there, it's never going to be a lie that he wants to be, when they're this far out.

 

~*~

 

Once, Jim asks Spock about his dissertation - he knows Spock must have done one, and he wants to know. Spock dubs the whole thing down for him - the way he imagines Spock would explain it to particularly stupid undergraduates, or a very bright child, or Scotty, who wouldn't be paying attention anyway. 

 

Jim fucking hates when people do that, and so he is relentlessly, _obnoxiously_ intelligent at Spock for the entirety of the next day, while Spock seethes. He's actually fairly certain he disproves one of Spock's arguments (which was not easy, and he's still not entirely sure Spock's not going to kick his physical ass for it or just intellectually wipe the ground with him when he finds the weakness in Jim's argument). This gets them through to dinner, at which point Jim starts in on a new study he knows Bones is reading and Spock storms out of the room (well, for a certain value of storms; he walks out of the room after only apologizing to Uhura and then sits in their room reading a book he probably got from Sulu because it is about new schematics for rudders).

 

He eventually leaves to go to bed, and Spock is still sitting there, determinedly staring at his book and probably still really pissed off (with Spock, it's all in the eyebrows; Spock and Number One could take lessons from each other in being stoic and drive Chris crazy). He gets changed, brushes his teeth, checks his email, checks that Sulu's OK on the bridge for another couple hours and then gets in bed because he'll take an early morning shift on the bridge (well, it'll actually be the middle of the night - he'll go out at one, but he finds its easier to get out of bed if you really devote yourself to the pretense that it's morning) and then go back to bed at five in the morning, probably, if he's lucky. Spock will follow Uhura out at six, and then will stay with Jim when he comes back at eight until whenever he feels Jim can be coaxed out. It'll be wonderful. 

 

 

"So, the thing is," he says, rolling over to look at Spock because he's not going to actually fall asleep with Spock being _Spock_ at him and because he never actually knows when he's taken something too far, "even if I agreed with your research method, which I don't, because I don't think you forgot the basic meaning of the word hypothetical somewhere halfway through the third question on the second questionnaire and you just went completely off the rails from there. Anyway, even if I agreed with that I'm still saying that the relation you're trying to demonstrate between drag-netting and larger pod behavior cannot possibly be causal."

 

"Why are you _here_?" Spock asks, instead of offering any sort of rebuttal. 

 

"You already asked that. It's the slightly unhealthy devotion to whales, remember?"

 

"When I thought that you were only on the _Enterprise_ because of your arrest record," Spock tells him, stubbornly. "I understand that you are passionate, but do you not understand that your intellect would be of much greater use were it _trained_?" 

 

"Never really liked school," Jim shrugs. It's mostly a canned explanation and everyone likes it. _Nobody made me go that often until I was fifteen_ never really goes over as well. 

 

"Your teachers were not as smart as you," Spock tells him, matter-of-fact. "I did not like high school for the same reason. It passes, Jim. It would be much better now." 

 

"I'm happy here," Jim says, "I'm just _fine_ here." He's aware that he feels weird, lighter than he did before, because Spock clearly thinks he's something more than pretty and stubborn and fucking obsessed, but still. This is an argument he had for two solid years with Chris and only doesn't have anymore because Chris gave up.

 

"You never think that you could do more?" He'd get offended, except Spock sounds both like he's incredibly curious and like he was trying not to ask again, and is now disappointed that he has asked. "You are intelligent," Spock reiterates. 

 

"I'm good at what I do." 

 

"Yes," Spock says, and then adds, "brash and untraditional, but you are good." This, from Spock, is high praise, but Jim's going to stop fishing before Spock brings it all down on his head. "But you could do much more than you do now - you could do my studies, or Scotty's work, with sufficient training." 

 

"I _like_ what I do now," Jim tells him, again, mildly frustrated now. It's always been a good enough reason for him. And he does like what he does - he likes exposing people for being assholes and he likes his whales and he likes his crew and he loves that he and Chris got to this place where everyone's kind of proud of everyone else and it's awesome. He doesn't like that apparently Spock thinks it's something less than important, less than what he could do with a degree, because it's _not_, not to Jim, and he's pretty sure not to anyone else either. He still wants Spock to think well of him. It's stupid and he kind of wants to let the conversation drop before he wades into it any further. 

 

Spock doesn't let that happen, because Spock is more annoying than Jim and about as sneaky and Uhura and just a really, all around, terrible person (except in the ways he's wonderful, which Jim mainly chooses not to think about). He lulls Jim into this weird sense of security, where Spock is now staring at Jim's _face, _but it's not as awful as when he was staring at the back of Jim's neck, before, when Jim was still being sensible and not engaging the angry PhD in conversation so it's fine. Also, Spock is kind of big on staring. Mostly, Jim tries to be asleep by the time Spock gets in or just ignores it with pretty much all of his willpower until he has to go sleep somewhere else. 

 

"Do you believe that you could do what I do?" Spock asks, finally, as if he's building up to another argument, but then there's some shuffling from his bed and the sound of the book, like maybe he thought better of it. 

 

Jim thinks _not the way you do it, but yeah_ all at once, but Spock's gone back to the book and he just falls asleep instead. 

 

~*~

 

 

The first phone call is the same as it always is - fifteen rapid-fire questions about his doctor's appointment, like Jim's reading off a checklist, like Jim went to medical school instead of just bunking down in Chris' hospital room for the first couple months after some drunk idiot rammed into Chris's car on the way to a late night vote. Those, Chris answers. Calmly and completely, makes sure McCoy's in the room in case there's anything Jim does miss, makes sure there's never anything bad to report - maybe sometimes more for the sake of Jim's nerves and Number One's blood pressure than anything else. The doctors still want him in braces again in five months, and he hears McCoy making happy noises - or what passes for them with McCoy - when Jim repeats that. He always repeats it all, makes sure he's got it right.

 

The next part of the conversation does not go so well, and it doesn't go well for the next week - it won't again, probably until they're safely in Hawaii.

 

"You getting any sleep?"

 

"You don't need to worry about me."

 

"Answer my question, Jim."

 

"Stop with the scary voice, I'm very far away and you can't get me."

 

"James."

 

"And the concerned voice."

 

"I _am_ concerned. It is the tone of my voice because they are my feelings. How are you?"

 

"Red's still about half a day behind, bit to the East, too. I'm thinking maybe we'll catch him up tomorrow, I wanted you to know. Also, can you get in touch with our guy at the University of Hawaii labs? Spock wants a microscope."

 

"Answer my question."

 

"Oh, shit, I gotta go. I'll call." 

 

"James," but the call's already been ended. The only reason he doesn't slam the phone is because Number One works outside his office and has ears like a fucking bat.

 

He also likes to keep bad news off Jim's plate around this time of year - so yeah, there's a couple Japanese research ships in the vicinity, but they're authorized and they're supposed to stay away from anything tagged. He starts getting reports, though - from a guy in the Coast Guard who hears these things and lets a guy he knows in Anchorage know on the condition that said guy never reveals the identity of the first guy, even if Chris is almost sure he knows who it is. That actually doesn't matter. What matter is they're talking about something coming out of Japan, not exactly authorized, but definitely a whaler, definitely going for humpback, and probably going to catch up with the Alaska-Hawaii pod sooner rather than later. It's the kind of thing that all the protectiveness in the world can't exactly stop him from putting on Jim's desk.

 

He's a coward, so he does it in email.

 

~*~

 

"OK, idea," Jim says, tiredly. "How about instead of talking about Spock's deep and dark secrets, I go to bed right now, and then, in the morning, we continue to not talk about this, ever again. Not because I know some huge secret about Spock's life, but because I'm really bored with this conversation, and, actually, with you as a human being."

 

"You're saying you know nothing? He doesn't talk to anyone but you - well, Uhura, but she's a good person and doesn't tell people stuff. You don't suffer from this problem." Sulu examines Jim, carefully. "You gotta know _something_. Where's he from? Why is he like that? I asked Uhura but she won't tell me anything but Arizona and that she wants to know why I'm like _this_."

 

"I've always wanted to know that, too. I mean, with the child problem and all that - I think there are more things wrong with you than you let on when I hired you."

 

"You hired me because I had a sword and you thought that was cool, also because at the time there was an arrest warrant out for me and that was entirely your fault. Let's not forget that ever, OK? Who are his parents?'

 

"They're his parents. They're not spies. Sulu, seriously, what do you want me to say? He's just like that, he's Spock. Also, I ruined your life, I'm really sorry, let's all move on. Yoshiko got really weird anyway, and we both know it."

 

"Nyota says they're big deals and she _had kids_ and _settled down_. They're really cute kids, too."

 

"His mom was an activist or something. She knew Chris. And they wouldn't have been that cute if they were your kids. She still would've gotten really weird though - did she tell you that she doesn't let them eat gluten? Like, they could, but she won't _let them_." Jim resents people who choose not to eat things, also people who can have dogs and don't. 

 

"God punishes you for what you've done to me with your allergies but yes, OK, that is kind of weird," Sulu informs him, not for the first time. Jim has this great moment of thinking maybe he's distracted Sulu now, but he is not that lucky. "Is that how he got the job? Because I Googled him and his strengths aren't primary research, you know, he should be -"

 

Jim's email alert beeps at him, and he dives for the computer.

 

"Oh, look, an email. It's probably really important, because, you know, I have a real job and don't spend all my time obsessing about underage boys and the private lives of your coworkers and actually have _shit to do_."

 

"His birthday's in a week, Captain, don't be an ass. And like hell you don't - you tried to call in a favor and get a secret service check on the last guy who asked Uhura out."

 

"And until then, it's still just a little gross." Jim fires back and ignores everything else because Uhura deserves nothing but the best and it wasn't like Cupcake had _agreed _(Jim refuses to speculate on whether this is because the guy could probably kill him in ten seconds or less with a pen lid and Jim still calls him Cupcake. He means it with love).  He can't be blamed for something that didn't end up happening. 

 

Reading the first paragraph is typical Chris. _Please do not freak out. If you do, go get McCoy. Don't fuck the marine biologist. Be nicer to Uhura. Eat vegetables. Your mother called; told her to fuck off and die in politician. _Which, really, if that what Chris was preparing for - yeah, there was that one time that Jim picked up the phone, and it wasn't pretty, and it ended in alcohol poisoning and Chris grounded him until - actually, Jim's turning twenty-four in six weeks and he's pretty sure he might still be grounded, technically speaking. 

 

There's another paragraph of _I am fine, doctors say I'm fine, have an appointment with the physio guy on Tuesday and Number One won't get me out of it _(Jim'll have to get her something good for Christmas - she's a nice lady, she should marry Chris and Jim's half convinced Chris is only still in the chair because he keeps getting out of physio, and, OK, because of what the braces did to his knee last year, and he's pretty sure Number One agrees with him at least about the knee and maybe the other thing; they probably invented the word inscrutable just for her).

 

And then at the end, there's the actual content of the email - a ship called the _Kobayashi Maru_, out of Japan but they haven't got more than that - it's an older whaler, probably making a mess as it moves _towards them._

 

"Find me Uhura," he snaps out, sounding more like Chris than he ever has before (something he's always been comfortable with, something he's always kind of wanted, if he's going to be completely honest with himself, which he might as well be). "Do it right now, I don't care if she's asleep, tell her it's important."

 

Sulu looks - well, quite honestly, he looks just a little terrified.

 

Good; someone needs to be because Jim is just _pissed_.

 

~*~

 

Spock knew, before, that Nyota did some research on whale song, and that every once in a while she'd get a call from the Senator telling her that they needed better press coverage and it fell to her to go and find it.

 

He did not know, before, that she did _this_, seated at a radio, the best of the computers onboard at her side,  barely able to focus on either while Jim paces behind her. Spock had come up here for Jim, really, but now he is involved in watching them _both_. He had thought, when Sulu had rushed into their room, breathless and grabbing at a notebook Jim had left lying on the bed, that Jim would be in some sort of emotional crisis. From what he had seen - from what he had thought he had known - he had believed that he might finally see a situation in which it would be justified for the doctor to sedate the captain. 

 

It's not, though - it's not a situation that calls for that at all. Nyota, in her efficiency, in her _skill _at trying to pick up a signal when they don't even know what they're looking for or where it is, is impressive. Spock was not entirely sure what she was looking for, when he came up and Jim had explained it - quickly, and he _always_ speaks quickly, but this time the words had been bitten off, nearly military in their cadence. Right now, there is a suspicion that there is a ship. That if it exists (it probably does) then it might be somewhere near them. Nyota's job is the get a hold of a signal that might or might not exist, might or might not be encrypted and might or might not be in Japanese, and then to keep a hold of it for long enough to figure out where it's coming from, and the intent of its sender. This, Spock thinks, is rather a steep request to make of anyone - but Nyota seems more than pleased to do it.

 

Jim is _beautiful_, stiffly calm and colder than Spock has ever seen him before. He can tell that Jim is scaring Sulu, a little, perhaps also Pavel. Scotty's with the engines. McCoy hasn't been woken - there's nothing he could do. Spock wouldn't have been either, if he hadn't shared a room with Jim. This is being done efficiently, ruthlessly and quickly. Jim is _brilliant_ in it, and Spock is too tired to keep from being overwhelmed by it, to keep from thinking of it, from focusing on Jim's hands when they sweep over the back of Nyota's chair or to keep from losing minutes in the minutia of Jim's body. It's late. None of them should be awake, and Spock loses control when he's this tired, not enough that people would notice it - not yet - but just enough that he notices it, that it irritates him and that he wishes he could call his mother and tell her that he's not having the best day. 

 

He feels a little jealous of Jim, who has been on the phone to the Senator three times tonight, just quick calls, but every time he laughs when he hangs up. 

 

"Dealing with _this_ and he wants to know have I eaten?" 

 

"Shut up, I can't hear when you're talking," Uhura snaps. Jim steps back, though he doesn't leave sight of her, doesn't leave the space where he can probably still read her screen over her shoulders "I've got something but it's maybe Norwegian - we know anything about Norway's plans right now?" 

 

"Later in the season they'll send out a fleet, but they're not sending out whalers right now and sure as fuck not coming out of Shiogama," Jim answers, quickly. 

 

"We know Shiogama? I mean, I thought this thing only showed up on the Senator's radar yesterday." 

 

"He thinks we know Shiogama, but we know Japan at least, so I'm going with a Japanese crew." 

 

"And they're not government authorized? Because, Captain, I love this job, and we are not the guys who throw rotten butter at people, we aren't going to be. If I'm going to interrupt signals and fuck with people's lives instead of just listening to whale song, I have to know that they -" 

 

"Chris made Number One wake a guy up in the _Kokkai_ half an hour ago, and he's saying it's not theirs." 

 

"_Captain_." 

 

"Uhura, I do crazy shit; I don't pull you into it." 

 

"My whole life, on the other hand," Sulu puts in from where he's standing at the controls, not doing anything because, presumably, there is nothing to be done in the moment but wait for Jim to tell him his next plan, "is just him pulling me into his crazy shit. Captain, nothing's going to happen right now just because you know about it. We're dead in the water until tomorrow which was your idea. Please, let me go to bed so I can be useful when I need to be." Jim nods. 

 

Spock is surprised by the way Jim sees reason when there is something _wrong. _The captain is usually so deeply, unreasonably passionate that this is new - this calm, cool control of everything in him that cares so much that Spock imagines it must hurt. He's blown away by this, and he wants to help Jim with his work. He's helped Jim, helped him to pull himself out of spaces that Spock knows well how to get out of and endeavored to do what Jim has asked of him in his own research. He has never wanted to do something for _Jim_ before. 

 

He has nothing to do with illegal whaling, only barely understands the laws - the United States enforces an international moratorium on whaling, in many ways, and so Jim feels better in territorial waters, is mostly what Spock knows. It has never been something that he needs to know. The policy is only loosely enforced in territorial waters- but here there is nearly nothing that can be done. Without an awareness of the location of the ship, there is little any of them can do. Even if they did know they are unarmed, and there is nearly nothing they could do to prevent violent action.

 

He realizes, with a chill, that this is another of Jim's media wars, another time when he is not trying to prevent the _next_ thing from happening, but the event after that, and perhaps the one after that.  

 

"What can I do?" he asks, in one of the moments when Jim has turned towards him. 

 

"Right now the only one who can do anything is her," Jim jerks his head towards Nyota. "Unless you pray." 

 

"I do not." 

 

"Then go to bed," Jim says.

 

~*~

 

There's this few days when Jim barely lets Uhura sleep, and a couple times they think they grab a signal that _might_ be the _Kobayashi Maru, _but it's faint and they're either using code or genuinely not bad guys. Chris says they're the bad guys, and Jim believes that. He sleeps when he has to and he makes sure that the engines are in perfect running order just in case they need them. If something's going to happen, he wants to be able to go to where it's happening. Nyota says there is some talk about humpbacks over the transmissions she's been reading, though no real _awareness_ of them, which is good. But the second that Jim hears that there is, he wants to be able to _be _there, and possibly become the crazy people who throw rancid butter as if that'll do anything to stop them from killing something precious, if he has no other way of stopping it. George and Gracie are far enough away from him that there's not really much he can do, and he knows that he should get them more into the middle of that gap - triangle, really, George has gone further East than he ever has before and Gracie's West.

 

They're moving again; but he feels like they're staying still. There's this weird sense of absolute standstill that's killing him slowly, and he gets that it shows. Red's close enough that whenever the ship's not actively making huge amounts of noise he's practically bumping his nose up against it. Like a puppy begging for treats, Jim thinks, leaning over the side and waiting for him to breach again. He's been showing off lately, and Jim spends a couple minutes wondering who, precisely, Red thinks he's showing off _for_. Jim's spent enough time down with the whales in scuba gear that Red's barely afraid of him, but even he knows that there's no way Red associates that with the big white thing that follows him around at all times. He also gets that 'not actively running away from him' is not at all the same as 'recognizing him as something alive and worth not swatting to death'.

 

But in the end they still know less than nothing and there's not much they can do but keep both eyes open, which Jim makes them do anyway. 

 

It makes him nervous, but he's not killing himself and that's better than any other way it could have gone. 

 

He's also making an effort to let Uhura sleep more when he needs her, which means he has to stay out of her bed at least half the time (he doesn't know when he got to be a twelve year old girl at a sleepover, but clearly it happened, because he can't get in bed with her and not keep her up talking). Which means he's back in his _own_ bed, which means he has to be around Spock, which is something he only minds when Spock is examining him, like he is right now. Like Jim's one of his godforsaken slides and he's been stained wrong or something. Jim keeps opening his eyes, smirking at Spock to show him that he fucking knows that Spock is looking at him, and then pretending to go back to sleep in the desperate hope that Spock will turn into a normal person who gets that message from all of the smirking. 

 

He's _not_ though. Spock missed that day in early childhood development where you learn to read body language, or he's just so intent on whatever it is he's thinking about Jim that he's no longer paying attention to Jim in the present. Jim kind of doesn't care. The staring is giving him _ideas, _but he's actually fairly certain that Spock is into Nyota, and that he's kept Spock for _so long_ now anyway, and Spock is good at his job and fits in with them in this easy way, like the last piece of one of those puzzles where they don't give you the picture. So he's trying not to have ideas, but it's not like he's ever been able to control what the hell happens in his head. It has not gotten significantly better in the - _fuck_, it's been a month and half since he got Spock and the child. It seems like less time, or maybe more. Different, anyway.   

 

"If you don't stop staring at me," Jim says, and then realizes that he has really no threat he could make. "I'll be really, really unhappy with you, and I probably won't sleep at all and I'll probably do something horrible and irresponsible in my sleep deprived state. I could maroon Bones and then we'd all get colds or whatever." 

 

"I do not, honestly, believe that the medical care on this vessel would change significantly with the absence of the good doctor." This is Spock's version of a joke. It's not exactly funny, but there it is. Maybe Jim just doesn't get it. 

 

"Be nice to Bones. And seriously, why the fuck are you staring at me like that?" 

 

"You are interesting," Spock says, "and so I am staring at you." 

 

"Telling me you think I'm pretty?" Jim tries _really_ hard to make it into a joke. They learned with Gaila that just because he doesn't come onto _them_ doesn't mean that fucking the marine biologist is right. Which, seriously, is it something about them? At some point in the program do they make them crazy? He's had sex with Sulu - well, OK, blowjobs in a closet that was mostly about adrenaline and not very much about each other at all - but the point is Sulu did not become any more crazy than he was before. Which he brings up every time Uhura suggests his semen makes people lose their minds - and anyway, he bags it, because if he didn't, Bones would _know_ and then he'd have to hear about it for the rest of time. And then he would maroon Bones. And get guilty and go back and get him, which it would be hard to persuade George and Gracie to go along with (Red, he's pretty sure, might actually be following the ship. He can't prove it, and it's stupid, but he _thinks _it).  

 

"I would not use that word, no," the thing about Spock that stops Jim from thinking he's funny, is that you can't actually tell when Spock's playing the straight man and when he's just being legitimately the weirdest person Jim has ever met. He could only tell when they were talking about marooning poor Bones because Spock's ridiculous about hurting things.  He'd never let Jim maroon Bones, even if he hates the man something awful (and Jim has no idea why, maybe 'cause Bones hates him right back, but just in the way that Bones hates everyone who isn't Joanna or, on his good days, Jim). 

 

"Handsome?" He drawls it, pulls out the vowels and knows he sounds about five. It's a talent. 

 

"Conceited," Spock says, "and not physically deformed in a noticeable way." Jim chooses to take this as a compliment, it's easier than the alternative.

 

"So, why the staring if it's not for the view?" There's a sort of pause, and Spock's a deliberate person - Jim's never seen him say anything he didn't mean, do anything he didn't intend to do - but he also, Jim's pretty sure, thinks faster than most people could imagine. "You don't have to tell me," he says. He doesn't want to make trouble. If he does, he probably won't be able to get back to sleep and no matter how well he's taking this, he knows he'll be up at six, which is - fuck. Five hours away. "Just, you know, stare slightly above my head or something?"  

 

"It is because," Spock stops. "I find you an interesting subject of study, that is all." Jim feels simultaneously flattered and frightened, which is kind of getting to be what he always feels when Spock says vaguely nice things about him. "It really prevents you from sleeping when I look at you?" 

 

Jim doesn't know what to say to that. There's no fucking way of saying that in his experience that's something you do when you think the other person in the room is as likely as not to attack you. It's something you see in shelters and in prison. It's something Jim's brother used to do, after his mom's first husband. It's maybe - and Jim doesn't think about this too deeply, but his therapists have told him so - why Jim likes to share rooms with people. If they aren't watching you, it means they trust you. If they trust you than maybe it'll be a bit harder for them to leave you. Jim - Jim got left a lot, as a kid. Chris didn't leave, and that helped 

 

He doesn't know why he wants Spock's trust so bad. And yeah, not prone to self-analysis (there's enough people paid to do it for him, it's like crossing a picket line or breaking union rules or something), but he thinks it should scare him exactly how badly he wants it. 

 

"Yeah, it does." 

 

"Then I will stop," Spock says. "Though for a person of your willpower I find it strange that -" 

 

"It also stops me from sleeping when you _talk_." 

 

Spock falls silent, and Jim thinks maybe he's offended him. But he falls silent _facing the other way_, so Jim cannot be brought to give a flying fuck until he's gotten at least another couple hours of sleep. Which is a terrible thing but - well, he's actually said kind of a lot of awful shit to Spock in the past few days, and been crazy in his general direction, and Spock just sat there through it, and so he feels like maybe they've gotten to a place where he can, briefly, place his need to sleep above Spock's need to live in a Victorian tea party of politeness. Not that Jim actually minds that - he's at this place where he kind of likes how formal Spock can be. Now that Spock calls him Jim, anyway, that made it better. 

 

~*~

 

Migrations have never been this high-tension before. 

 

There are risks for humpbacks and risks that Jim takes following them, but they're the calculated kind.  There's Norway and there's Japan, both of which send out whaling fleets, but nobody touches humpbacks, not really. Jim's seen slaughtered whales, but he's seen the ones that are allowed to be killed. It's insensitive, but he's seen the ones that aren't _his_. And right now it's his who are threatened and he's not doing anything and he's nearly crawling out of his skin, but in a quiet, organized way. And that risk is the first thing he thinks of when he wakes up days past the point where it's normally become tolerable and intermittent worry instead of constant and biting. 

 

No one's doing anything and this means everyone goes more colorfully crazy than usual, excluding Jim because he has to sit around and be sane or else Chris (who is probably going to develop some sort of condition sooner rather than later with this) will have him airlifted out. He knows this, because Chris emails him to remind him, at least once in the morning and sometimes throughout the day along with updates. 

 

Scotty's - well, he's run out of Nutella, for one thing, and keeps trying to simulate it by crushing Uhura's pecans into Bones' stash of chocolate and tossing in some of Hikaru's instant coffee. This is not going well and he's getting increasingly grumpy and increasingly caffeinated as time goes on. Since he's caffeinated, he's _awake_ which is more worrying than anything else. He's playing with the walkies on the scuba gear because Jim's pretty sure they're not going to need that until Hawaii, so that's fine. But he's not actually sure how much longer he can keep Scotty distracted with that, or how much longer it's going to take for Scotty to actually improve them and need some sort of new project. He's considering letting him rewire the microwave.  

 

But that would prevent Sulu from having his instant coffee, which apparently no amount of regular coffee can ever replace, and then he'd stop just glaring into his coffee cup. Jim keeps trying to subtly aim the child in his direction, but it's not really working because since the child's the only one who can make Hikaru behave like a civilized person right now, Sulu's not civilized until he shows up, and the child's as skittish as a baby deer most of the time. 

 

Except, of course, with the damn filing. There had been a breakdown a little earlier that particular day wherein the child declared that he and Spock were the only people on board who properly understood the alphabet and with _all due respect_ Spock kept his own damn filing system and Jim would keep his hands out of the other one if he knew what was fucking good for him. 

 

The child - the _Enterprise'_s sweet, angelic, tousle-headed little child - had said fucking. He hadn't even had the decency to say it in Russian so Jim could pretend he was not a corrupter of underage geniuses_. _Jim had gone to see Bones, vowing that he was having heart palpitations and Bones had directed him back outdoors. where Hikaru is fencing invisible opponents and swearing beautifully in what might have been Tagalog. As far as Jim can tell, he only knows the bad words but he knows them _very well. _It occurs to Jim that there's probably more benefit in not pissing Pavel off anymore if this is what's going to his defense. It might have actually been funny if it hadn't been for the cooped-up crazy eyes, a couple weeks early, but Jim gets it and so he doesn't challenge Sulu to a duel or anything, because he would have actually lost an eye.

 

Chris would have been so damn happy about it if he had, too. Fencing, which Jim had done for maybe six weeks once because when he was fourteen apparently he was supposed to be violent in order not to commit any more crimes, was not Chris' favorite of his hobbies. There was something strange about a man who advocated archery in the back yard - which, OK, was fucking huge, and could have been a farm if Chris had been a useful human being - but got all terrified and left the building whenever Jim had brought out the fencing gear. When he was about sixteen, he had spent a while pulling out the fencing gear, watching Chris clear out, and then bringing girls over in the two hours he could count on Chris being somewhere else. 

 

Bones is Bones - Jim's known the man five years, and if there's a constant in this world, it's probably the fact that Leonard McCoy is pissed off, and he's not going to be interrupted in that anger byanything so inconsequential as what's going on around him. There is very little Jim finds so reassuring as getting thoroughly cussed out by McCoy as the man gets progressively more Southern. Other people have security blankets and drinking, he has that. And, well, drinking. 

 

Also, you know, sex. Sex is good. He kind of misses sex - but then he always does, this time of year. He has learned - well, OK, maybe he hasn't had time to _demonstrate_ that yet, but he really has after Carol  - that it's not so good to have anything going on with anyone he's doing the crossing with. They get disturbingly close, around now. Jim has a brother two years older than him, growing up, and they shared bedrooms and also went through hell together.

 

He doesn't know Sam half as well as he knows Uhura and Bones and Hikaru and Scotty. He probably knows him about as well as he knows Spock and Pavel. 

 

And he knows it freaks them all out. How they start to move together and flow together until yeah, they're still individual people, but they're also a _crew_. Chris was in the army and he'd tried to explain this to Jim before the first time, but he'd never gotten it before that first year. There's not a way he possibly could have understood exactly what it was like to have to spend this much time with other people, exactly how well you had to know them.  So he's going around putting out little fires until they all settle of their own fucking stupid, willful accords. And when he can't take it anymore he assaults Bones or Uhura, sticks his head in their laps and lets them play with his hair while he complains (or, well, generally Bones shoves him off, but he goes to Bones more for liquor than for comfort, so he's only made that mistake like six times in five years). Sulu kills them all with his imaginary sword. Bones is mean (this is Bones coping mechanism for good things, too. Bones is a broken being, sometimes). Uhura is relentlessly, irritatingly helpful all the time so that anything you ask her for feels completely unreasonable because clearly if she does one more productive thing, she'll die. Scotty fixes things. The child follows Jim around asking him for things to do, and then does them disturbingly quickly, so that Jim eventually has to start making things up. 

 

None of it is pretty. 

 

Spock's not freaking out, though. He's also not talking about why he's not, which is making Jim _curious, _even if it's not exactly unusual for Spock to be ridiculously close-mouthed about everything. Just, most people - they've had two marine biologists who dealt well with it - have a really good reason for having the ability not to go absolutely apeshit. And they go around _telling_ people about their really good reason and how everyone should grow up to be just like the people who can totally take long periods of isolation. And one of the few things that reassures Jim that Spock is not a robot is that Spock can't actually resist telling other people when they are wrong and he is right. 

 

If anything, Spock's doing whatever the hell loosening up is for Spock. His lips quirk when the child says something ridiculous and he freaking _smiled_ once at Uhura. When Jim stumbles in at four in the morning and Spock is still asleep, Spock rolls over, taking his cocoon of blankets with him, and glares at Jim with his one open eye. 

 

"Sorry," Jim says, even though he's mostly not. He likes the bridge and Sulu likes to sleep when it's dark, and so they make these little deals. "I thought you'd be, um, not here?" 

 

"Where, precisely, did you think I would be?" Spock asks, now opening both eyes, sitting up as if he has given up on sleep entirely. "Perhaps I had taken up with Doctor McCoy? There is something so _seductive_ about the way he stabs me with what I suspect to be sugar water. And the way he stumbles into the galley, still half drunk, on a Wednesday morning. I was quite entranced by it, Jim." 

 

This conjures _images_. But not the good kind - not the Bones and Uhura kind that Jim feels kind of bad about having but has totally had before. The horrifying kind, where he is best man at Bones and Spock's wedding and he can't drink because Bones is talking to him about livers again and he can't hook up with anyone, because Spock's so very _Spock_ that he can't possibly have hot friends who aren't Uhura. He's about to turn to Spock and remind him that this is so deeply not OK to even joke about, and list the many reasons that Bones makes an unacceptable life partner (because he doesn't think Spock does casual, and Bones has problems with casual sex Jim has never understood). But then he turns on the light so he can educate Spock about this, and Spock's kind of sleepily grinning to himself, except it's not quite grinning so much as _smirking_. Like Sulu, or the devil. 

 

Jim should be angry; instead he just kind of finds himself liking the guy a little bit more. And if he laughs, well, that could have been a hallucination of Spock's. He was pretty fucking out of it. 

 

And, apparently, grilling each other before they go to bed is becoming a thing. It's like how Jim imagines CIA agents do pillow talk, when he's drunk. CIA agents who can't have sex with each other, of course. And one of whom probably wouldn't be interested in it.  

 

"Were you in the army?" 

 

"No." 

 

"Boarding school?" 

 

"No." 

 

  

  1. "Your parents were terrified of flying and you took a tiny houseboat to every single one of your father's ambassadorial postings. You spent six months on a boat to Australia with only your parents and a charming teddy bear which was eventually tragically eaten by a shark and so are used to spending long periods of time isolated and cold and bored? There was no heating on that houseboat."   
  



 

"There must be something measurably wrong with you," Spock says, and quirks an eyebrow at Jim. Jim can just see him - there's light bleeding in because the door stopped closing about a day and a half ago. This was, actually, not entirely due to the fact that _Enterprise_ stops working at random and no one drunken Scotsman could hold it all together, and perhaps partially due to the fact that if he starts sleeping with Uhura every night there'll be talk, and Bones kicks. If he can't get any real privacy with Spock, he can't accidentally hit on Spock and so he made it so Uhura could always walk by, overhear and kill him for making a move. He actually does have self-restraint, it's just so much easier to use Uhura for the little things.

 

"You didn't deny it," he bites back.

 

"Nor did you," Spock says supercilious and smug but in this way that mostly makes Jim want to keep arguing with him for the rest of his life so Spock'll do it a lot more . It's not the kind of humor you _laugh_ at, and it's not the patent absurdity of well, pretty much everyone Jim knows, really. But it's _funny_. It's _likeable. _He used to have to persuade himself to like Spock; now he keeps trying to talk himself out of it.

 

So far he's come up with that you really couldn't introduce Spock to normal people, Spock would be boring as all fuck as a drinking buddy, and his socks _always_ match whereas Jim has like, a singular pair of matching socks, and they're Bones's (he went on a date once in Honolulu last year and decided that if it was his _intention_ to get laid, he might as well work for it).  

~*~

"I want to help," Spock tells Nyota, over coffee the morning after Jim keeps him up half the night trying to figure out why Spock has yet to lose his grasp on reality, which seems to be what Jim expects of him.

"You do," Nyota answers, "You do a better job of keeping the Captain sane than anyone else ever has, and - and if you tell him I said this I'll tell Scotty something really terrible about you and I'll make it sound true - but, anyway, we need Jim like this when we're all - like this. Are you done your coffee? Can I get you more?" 

"Sit," Spock says - Nyota's nervousness, or hyperactivity or whatever it is shows itself in her need to be constantly productive, constantly moving. Spock gets bored when he is doing nothing, but can lose himself in anything. He doesn't quite understand her, though he does understand that the stress of the past few days  is about to drive them all crazy and that it's best to keep her from the kitchen when Scott is down there attempting, once again, to simulate his preferred sandwich. 

"You're bossy," she grumbles, but stays, sipping from her own drink and poking at the radio - for weeks, Spock hadn't seen her touch it, and now she can't keep her hands off of it. "You want to listen to me for a while? See if you can get anything I haven't from the transmissions we've been picking up? I mean, we're all sitting on our asses until I hear something really incriminating or the captain finally cracks, and we haven't even seen the ship yet."

"Would it be of assistance to you?" Nyota examines him, carefully. 

"You don't mean that, you know that, right?" She believes herself to be a woman of great insight, though Spock believes her perceptiveness lies in her grasp of the meaning and nuance of language (which is exquisite). "I mean, you want to help. But not _me_, specifically. And not them either," her gesture appears to encompass the entire ocean, but Spock knows what she means. For them, at the moment, the Earth's seas have precisely three inhabitants. He knows it is not the best view to take, but it is an infectious one, and he has had trouble shaking it. "You're in it for the captain."

"I am actually quite certain that I am not."  

"You might be certain, but you're wrong. Spock, stop looking so affronted, I'll still take you up on it," she says, and brushes out her hair. She'll put it in a high twist later, he imagines - now it is down, loose around her shoulders, and it distracts him but not as much as - no. His mind does not go there. Jim is still asleep in their quarters and Spock had only fixated on the sight of his bare shoulder under the covers as he left because the Captain will get at least three more hours of sleep than Spock himself had, and Spock was jealous of that. Also, he suspects that Kirk has a better duvet than his cot was provided with and he covets it.  If there was lust there, it is because ships are not private places and there is little to lust _after_. And Kirk is not unappealing to the eye.

"I want to be of any assistance I can," he says - still a little put out. He does want to help Nyota, regardless of absolutely anything else that might be going on (he will not deny that he does want to help Jim; he will deny the implication that he has any different motives for that).

"That's at least true," Nyota tells him. He sometimes wants to tell her that he does not need her to tell him how he feels, or what he thinks - but then, she's stopped, probably knowing it's unnerving when she's right and irritating when she's wrong. She's already off describing her work, and so he cannot bring it up with her - transmissions she can't trace, but those that she can come from all the right places and maybe aren't going anywhere she thinks that they are. Words that Spock remembers vaguely that he must have learnt for a summit in Japan, at some point (his mother was always so insistent that he learn the language of the country they were in - he speaks a bit of each and is fluent in nearly none). And then she has explained everything she knows and is looking at him as if she expects something. He tries to see a pattern - any similarity to what he knows. He is good at looking for that.

"You said there may have been a transmission yesterday from Tokyo?"

"May have been," she sighs. "The surveillance tech Jim bought me isn't exactly legal and Chris doesn't know what it does because it does stuff that we're not, maybe, technically allowed to do. Anyway, everything we're not allowed to have came out of the Captain's pocket, the donations got us the stuff that actually works. So it's not, you know, great. Captain never held down a job before this one and so he had money for stuff that I could improve, and between me and Scotty we've still only got it up to something like acceptable."

"I can't imagine that the captain did," Spock says, distracted. "If it was Tokyo yesterday but New York this morning is it not possible that the organization controlling the ship is itself international?"  

"Unless I'm getting that from the transmissions, Spock, I can't -" 

"There are other ways of discovering that," he says, sounding much like the professor he wants to be, in six months when he is no longer on board the  _Enterprise_ (he has deluded himself into believing that that is an unimaginably long time, but he knows it is not). "If I could have your services as a translator I believe it is possible that I could procure some new information for the Captain within a week." 

"Of course," she says. "But what are you going to -" 

"It is best to not share the specifics," Spock rarely interrupts people, and he will have to tell her - later - that it is a sign of his comfort with her and nothing more. He turns to leave, thinking already of how he will start. He will begin with a call to his father's office; he's never been told not to use his father's resources and he's hardly going to start now. His mind is whirring with things he could connect this to, corporate names and places and dates that he has heard. It is not his strength, he must remember that, he will need assistance, but it is within his capabilities to discover the origins of the _Kobayashi Maru_ once he has it. 

"Spock?" she calls, when he's nearly outdoors. He stops, and does not turn. Whatever people say when to him when he is in a doorway, he finds, they don't want to say and he does not want to hear.  "You could just tell him that you want to be his friend. You don't need to give him anything back, I swear." 

"This has nothing to do with the captain," he says, "these creatures are important, ecologically." 

"Then how did you know I wasn't talking about Hikaru?" She calls, but he's already left, because she was right this time and he hates it when she can read him like that. 

 

~*~

 

Research is Spock's strength. He likes slides and files and papers and the thrill of discovering _knowledge_, not things. The whales shock him, make him remember what 'awesome' must have meant to begin with. But he likes this much better; fingers flicking through paper would be preferable, but the printer is not usable unless Jim says so, and he has no desire to have Jim hoping for things Spock's not sure he can prove, so he can't be asked. 

 

He can tell the precise moment when he started caring about the hopes of James Kirk - a few days ago, in the kitchens, having started some conversation. He cannot, now, even remember the topic, but it had been long, and Jim had been laughing, uproarious while trying to debate Spock's point.  Spock had arranged a chess game with Pavel earlier, and had had to leave.

 

And he had said, "I will see you tonight, Captain," and left the room wondering if it might be possible to get Jim to come back to their room before the small hours of the morning. Not because the man woke him stumbling around in the dark more effectively than he might have had he turned the lights on, but because Spock had wanted to continue the conversation. And he had called him Captain.  

 

Spock is a stranger to friends - home schooled as a child (there had been no options, on postings, and public schools had terrified him, driven him to hide in small spaces, crouched and sobbing, perhaps his mother had been soft on him, but that was the way of it), isolated throughout his high schooling and too smart to be interesting to anyone but his professors in his university education. In his graduate work he'd had lab partners, friends, two women he had slept with, one man. And Nyota - but Nyota is natural, she does not press for anything she is not offered. 

 

Jim pulls things out of him he had not known were there. Spock, of all people, never had the ability to soothe - and he does now. Jim did that.

 

Jim is his _friend_, and Spock wants to do something to make him happy (he would have denied this, but after Nyota had figured it out, he had dwelled on it, and then he had _needed_ to think about it so that he could think about other things, and it was true). So he does this - he does things that are perhaps not strictly legal with the computer and some tax codes, and calls in some favors owed to his father that his father will never collect, utilizes Nyota's expertise in translation once. Stays up later than he usually would and sneaks out after Jim has fallen asleep on nights Jim does not sleep elsewhere (he still wonders, occasionally, about Nyota and Jim, or Jim and the doctor, but Jim smirked at him when he asked and said that a warm body was a warm body and he loved them both, then he leered, as if he'd revealed too much about himself; Jim's defense mechanisms are fascinating things).  

It has been four days like this, and he thinks, maybe, looking at the last of the spreadsheets he has made - three corporate tax forms, one from Utah, one from Tokyo, and the last from New York State. They seem to be telling him that there was a ship purchased - cheaply - by an American corporation, and sold to a Japanese one that, in the long run, belongs to the same two men. Nero and Ayel are major figures in American business and Spock vaguely remembers attending a fundraiser at one of their homes. Nero had not been in attendance, though Ayel had. He does not remember what it was for, or why he had been there himself. His mother's idea, maybe, though that would mean it was a charity which was important to her and not only to his father's image which - he stops himself there. That's not the point.  Nero  has always been  - ambiguous, at best, in his business practices. He was involved in controversies throughout the decade before Jim's birth - mostly involving mining and mistreatment of their workers in Africa. They have been heavily involved in the sale of conflict diamonds, and the factory that they do own in the continental United States pays heavy fines rather than accepting most restrictions. There is only one of these, though, and all of that pales in comparison to their most major controversy. 

 

Twenty-four years ago, a man died in a protest in Malaysia against work being done by Narada in coral reefs that would eventually destroy them.  His wife was giving birth in the next room, having been part of the same sit in at the port where the ships transporting harvested coral were departing from. The official explanation had been that a rookie policeman had not known the difference between raising his hands in surrender and raising his hands defensively. 

 

He is sure that if they do anything to hurt George, Gracie or Red Jim will create hell until he is heard, and that there will be no force on this Earth that could stop him, no matter how admirable their public relations department must be. He is equally sure that Jim must - for whatever reason - not be aware of the true causes of his father's death, or he would already be exacting his vengeance. Spock understands this; when his mother had died, he had ceased the study of human biology altogether. He had not wished to know, if there was a way he could have saved her, if there was a way anyone could have saved her. He wonders if Jim might have made the same sort of choice in regards to his father's death; if he has chosen not to know, Spock will respect that.

 

Narada had purchased a ship two years ago, for no discernible reason, and that ship had been a retired whaler, much like _Enterprise _herself. Six weeks after that, a shell company had purchased a warehouse and docking rights in Shiogama. It is a well-suppressed but accessible fact that Nero, personally, has been involved in a great deal of work to legalize commercial whale-hunting, and has only conceded the idea of quotas unwillingly. Humpbacks have been of specific interest to him, for reasons Spock does not entirely understand - grey, he imagines, is more profitable. Blue more interesting, if the man wanted to sell the bodies to museums rather than as food - he is already typing, thinking of the files he will need to figure that out, when he remembers that is not _important_. What is important is that he has found someone for Jim to blame.   
   
He could not attribute a cause to the belief, but he thinks that if he can find that much, Jim will bring them to wherever else it is that they need to be to fix this. It makes him nervous, that unrooted belief. 

~*~

Waking up to find Spock staring at him isn't weird anymore, which is incredibly disconcerting. That's worrying in and of itself, but Jim is OK with that. He is troubled. He is an accepting being, and Spock's not doing anything. He's just thinking - Jim likes Spock (he knows that now, and it's sort of his new best reason for never thinking about Spock naked, despite how lovely those thoughts really are), and he trusts that whenever whatever's been percolating is ready Spock'll come out with it. Spock's normally just not doing his thinking while he sits _on Jim's bed._

He didn't think Spock needed so much proximity. Was he counting pores for this little thought exercise?

This is what Jim means to say. What comes out is; "thank fucking god you have coffee, someone better be fucking dead, Spock." And then he snatches the coffee away from Spock and curls around it in the corner of the bed that is tucked up against the wall, probably looking like a feral child improbably wearing University of Mississippi sweatpants and a Secret Service T-shirt. He doesn't care. It's warm and he can bring his blankets with him like this.  

"I was concerned that  _you_ had died in your sleep," Spock tells him, and Jim doesn't have to spend quite so much time trying to figure out if Spock's joking anymore - over dinner, two nights ago, he'd realized that Spock's eyes do this _thing_ when he thinks he's being funny. He's also not thinking about that while he's not thinking about naked Spock. He's most especially not ever thinking about Spock's eyes doing that while Spock is naked, because he'd been alone in the shower last time that had happened but it had still been a little embarrassing.   

"Disappointed?" 

"Most certainly not," Spock answers. "I have to talk to you." 

"I was _sleeping_, Spock, so no you don't," Jim tells him - he's pretty sure that's a rule. And Spock isn't gushing blood or covered in anyone else's so he's definitely making it a rule.  

"I have been doing some research -" 

"If this is about  _krill-" _

" If you would shut up?" Jim doesn't want to shut up , but that's possibly the most impolite thing Spock's ever said. He's shellshocked and pulls his blanket closer to him. Possibly he was right about Spock and Uhura, and this is the mutiny. "Good. I have been doing some research and I believe I can identify the origins of the _Kobayashi Maru_." 

"Thank you, Spock, but it's Shiogama and that's really not your -" 

"No," Spock says, "well, yes, in a way, but no," and then he explains it - taxes and cover ups and a couple truly exceptional tangents about the international drug trade. Jim doesn't talk because he can't, he has actually no idea what to say. 

Also, Spock's all _intense_ and it's ridiculous how hard Jim has to concentrate to keep up with Spock rather than just pushing him down onto the bed and possibly making him recite tax code while Jim sucks him off.  

Jim's really fucked up, and Spock enunciates really well, which is something that turns Jim on. He'll own that. Some people are into feet.  Spock finishes off, and anyone else would be looking to Jim for praise. Spock isn’t which is really good, because all Jim can summon is "that's not your job." 

Spock waits, patiently. 

"How smart _are_ you?" Jim gets out, perhaps a full minute later. He's loosened his grip on the mug, and the coffee's gone somewhere, but he is honestly incapable of saying if he drank it or possibly spilled it all over himself.  

"Incredibly," Spock says, and Jim sees the moment where he'd like very much to provide his IQ. There might be decimals involved - if anyone's IQ was going to have decimals, it'd be Spock's. He doesn't, though, for which Jim thanks any higher powers who listen to former felons in the middle of the Pacific. "But I do not know what do next. I hoped that you would, Captain."  

Improbably, ridiculously, selfishly, that's what makes Jim lunge at him, press him to the bed, and kiss him, lush and deep and stupid and Spock is not_ kissing back_ which is good because it takes Jim about eight seconds to realize that he shouldn't be doing that at all, and also that he really, really needs to get off before Spock's hands, hovering ineffectually above his back, move to his neck. Then he needs to apologize forever and reassign Spock to share with Uhura who is going to kill him in his sleep if he even lasts that long and maybe he needs to try and swim home and -

Spock's hands settle on his shoulders and pull him closer. 


	2. Part Two

Jim wakes up and he doesn't remember falling asleep; he remembers kissing Spock and he doesn't remember stopping, and so he thinks they must have fallen asleep like that which is not what Jim normally does when he has gorgeous marine biologists on his bed. Granted, what he normally does has never actually ended well, but that is almost entirely beside the point.  
This time, though, he wakes up dressed (mostly) and with Spock's arm trapped up against his back and Spock's breath hot on his neck, which is wonderful. Jim rolls over, and he must wake Spock doing that, because he's looking into Spock's eyes and he feels like a teenaged girl (or Bones; this is what he imagines Bones is like in bed, not that he's really spent a lot of time thinking about that). And so Spock kisses him which wasn't what happened at all last night, and Spock's all curious when he's doing it, and he's on top of Jim, which is sort of nice. It's like Jim's being tasted and Spock's almost - it's not like he's judging him, it's like he's categorizing him. Which makes Jim think of krill, which is not precisely the sexiest thought he's ever had, so maybe it's a good thing that that's when Spock pulls back.   
"You have things to do today," Spock informs him, before leaning to down to kiss him again, still tasting him and this time Jim manages to not think about crustaceans, which is awesome. He manages to just think about the feel of his hands on Spock's back, the smoothness of Spock's skin like this (and how did he get Spock's shirt off, but not his pants? He disappoints himself in so many ways).

"Yeah," Jim says, finally, when Spock has apparently decided that air is more important than kissing Jim. "I've got you to do."

"Whoever told you that you were funny," Spock tells him, managing to sound really smart for someone who is quite clearly putting all of his brainpower into not thrusting against Jim's hand, which has slid down his pants in Spock's time of distraction (it's a skill) "was lying to you quite egregiously. Perhaps after you are done dealing with the current crisis you could find them so that I could have them punished?" Then he rolls off the bed.

"Seriously?" Jim whines (and maybe he just is a teenaged girl, but that deserved whining), and Spock nods, and then - relenting, possibly, or maybe just knowing that it was the only way Jim will get out of bed - kisses him once more (and ends up on top of him on the bed; it's not like Jim's unskilled or anything).

"You do have other things to do," Spock says, after, and shoos him out. "We will do this again."

And they do. Jim just doesn't get to be the aggressor, like, ever.

And he's not complaining - he really likes making out with Spock. Really, really, a lot. And now he gets to do it a lot. Spock has a really amazingly wicked tongue and it can make up for a lot of his general Spockness when it's given a chance. Not that Jim necessarily minds most of the Spockness.

What he minds is that he can't predict when he'll get to touch Spock. He is apparently not in charge of making out - he initiated it the first time, and apparently he'll never get to do it again. Not that he's really tried because Spock's always there first, which would be great if he thought it was that Spock was desperate for his body. But he mostly doesn't think it's that (well, he thinks it has to be a little bit that). It's just this feeling he has like he has to wait for Spock to take the next step. And it's like no matter how much he tries to force himself to do start things with Spock, he can't quite get there; everything he'd normally do feels like it somehow isn't the right thing to do next, and now he's got the idea that Spock would know what that right thing would be. Which is, of course, ridiculous because it's Spock and about half the time it's like Spock isn't even from the same damn planet with the way he acts around people, so of course Spock doesn't know what to do next.

Jim kind of wants to ask Bones, the most cynical man on earth, since Bones thinks he can figure everyone out in about ten seconds and Jim needs the certainty of Bones thinking everyone's an asshole right now. He could also ask Uhura, who might actually give him the right answer, or tell him what to do or what he was feeling, but he thinks there'd be an ass-kicking in it somewhere.

And it's not that it really irritates him, they're still doing stuff and it's great stuff, but he feels like the girl And yes, he is all about the sensitivity and he gets that there isn't supposed to be a girl. But if he was allowed to talk about this to anyone he would still tell them that he's the girl and that being Spock's girlfriend really fucking sucks. Because he's the girl, and so he has to wait for stuff to happen to him, and then he gets to decide whether or not he wants it to keep happening. In case Spock was wondering? Jim wants pretty much everything to keep happening. Forever.

But there is no forum in which he can say that because the only time they actually talk about their relationship is about four days after it starts when Spock pulls him into what is theoretically a pantry but what is mostly Bones' spare needle closet. Jim's always really freaking nervous when he has to go in there (which is, yes, OK, mostly for hiding from Bones or that one really awful week every January when he has to do inventory and he's normally lost a bet just before and so he has to do the medical inventory too, and he does suspect Bones of cheating, but Bones never actually does a count when he's supposed to do it, he just makes a list of stuff he wants, like a kid writing to Santa). The thing is, though, that Spock tricks him into the closet by backing him up against the wall and sucking a bruise into his neck (which he's going to have to cover with a hoodie for fucking days, but he can't actually bring himself to ask Spock not to). Point being that when Spock announces that they need to come to an accord, he's already nervous and horny and generally not in the sort of state he wants to be in to come to accord with Spock about anyone. Or to carry on a conversation in fluent English with anyone.

"An accord? It's hooking up Spock, not the Treaty of Versailles."

"Which was, overall, historically unsuccessful."

"Sex is mostly successful, well, I mean, I guess that depends what you think the goal of sex is, because if it's impregnation then I guess you and I'll be pretty huge failures, so maybe that's a problem, but if it's pleasure than I think I can probably do that. You know, unless you pulled me in here to tell you're a eunuch or something - are you? 'Cause that'd actually be a really good reason why I've never seen you naked and they can still get -"

"Captain."

Jim pokes him hard in the side to remind Spock that this is a first-name time. Not that there isn't some hotness there, but he's pretty sure that Spock and roleplay were going to be mutually exclusive concepts. Spock would have too many questions and probably stop in the middle of like, a blow job, to point out a plot inconsistency in Jim's fantasies and so it would be best never to try.

"You are babbling. It is not attractive," Spock continues, as if he had never been poked at all.

"You think everything I do is attractive ," Jim argues back, and looks up through his lashes to emphasize his point. It's been four days, and he's already figured that this and his really atrocious habit of chewing on his knuckles when he's waiting for something get him up against a wall really fast. Spock's hand, at his hip, tenses. Jim wants bruises from those fingers - it's a really good fantasy, Spock marking him all up, and then resting his hand there during the day and no one else would know, but Jim would. In his fantasies, there's a lot of casual touching. Jim has this whole policy about not examining what gets him off, so he doesn't think about it at all.

Spock sighs, once, heavily. Spock, Jim is beginning to think, finds Jim to be a great burden on him, and possibly on the world as a whole. That's actually kind of fine - it's how Bones sees him, and Jim's pretty sure that under there somewhere Bones adores him.

"Be that as it may," Spock says, still sounding more controlled than he normally does - which means that he's horny or exasperated or murderously angry or all three, "There should be some sort of conversation if we are going to continue to-" there's some rather pathetic helpless gesturing. Like a baby bird taking off. An idiot baby bird that's going to have its head smacked on the ground.

"Make out in dark places?" Jim suggests.

"Accurate." This makes Jim feel oddly accomplished. "We need to establish our roles."

"I - okay , that's hot," Jim answers. "If you wanna play it like that, I guess." Spock stares at him, blankly. "It's not really my thing, to you know, lay it out like that, I'm more about seeing how it goes once we get started, but -"

"I was not referring to sexual positions," Spock interrupts, looking offended. A little distracted, but mostly offended and blushing. Jim decides that he's really going to have to teach Spock to talk dirty, or just whisper filthy things in Spock's ears for hours, sometime and get him all worked up if that's how he reacts when it's this fucking clinical.

But that decision is made while he's reeling Spock in for a kiss because Spock wants to make rules for making out and Jim's in this weird phase where Spock has almost all-the-way saved his babies. So he has to kiss him. It's important. And that doesn't count as initiating something because there was tongue at the beginning to trap him in the damn pantry, so it's more of a continuation.

"I meant only that I was unclear on the structure of our relationship," Spock says, once he he's pulled back.

"We're just," Jim makes some of his own broad gestures and had tries remember that he was good at semi-illicit sexual encounters in secluded and weird places. At some former point in time, he'd been able to make people really want to have sex with him, he's almost entirely certain of it. At that period in his life - which is rapidly fading into the mists of time, for which he might blame Spock if Uhura wasn't so convenient for that sort of thing - he's pretty sure he would have been able to say something that would have gotten him blown right there in Bones' spare needle closet.

Spock kisses him while he's still pausing and gesturing and trying not to knock over what looks like morphine - which, really, when are they going to need morphine?

"Yeah, we're doing that," Jim says, because, well they are, and if he hadn't said it all out-of-breath and earnest it might have been an awesome line, really. And maybe Spock hasn't noticed the emotions of it, because Spock can kind of miss stuff about people sometimes (not often stuff about Jim, but it's happened).

They never actually manage to sort out any rules, aside from a general sort of idea that telling anyone is a terrible plan because then people will know and then when it eventually goes to shit, they'll know about that, too. Or, actually, they'll probably find out when Spock quits in a huff and then Chris calls to yell at Jim and does it loud enough that people in the next room can hear. Jim's actually not sure how much of that is just him, but Spock kind goes along with it and then suggests that Uhura's going to find out whether or not Jim actually wants her to. He does think he's smarter than one little linguistics genius though, and it makes him happier to ignore Spock about that. The point is, there are no rules but they're not telling people and that's something Jim can be happy about.

Jim's not the kind of guy who plans this shit, but he still feels that maybe there should've been more planning that should have happened at some point. He's not sure what that would have looked like, but Spock likes to plan stuff. He has this kind of ridiculous moment of thinking that it's awesome that he's the one thing Spock can't plan for, and then he feels very guilty about that thought.

~*~

Chris talks to Jim at least once a day, sends him a couple emails if there's something else that they need to talk about. It's not obsessive, it's just the amount of communication that they both need. So it means Number One mostly doesn't talk to anyone on the Enterprise unless she's doing pay. When she's doing pay, she talks to Nyota to figure out social security numbers or how they're supposed to pay Scotty when it's entirely possible he's an illegal immigrant. Chris doesn't know. There's a reason Number One does it and he doesn't. This is that reason. But it does mean he gets this, which is Number One perched on the chair across from him, coming as close to bouncing her seat as she's ever likely to.

"Your son," she announces, and it kind of stings because he thinks of Jim as his son because Jim is, but it's not something Jim says. It's not something either of them really lets anybody else but Chris say out loud, either, "has fallen in love."

"He told you so, did he?"

"He as good as told me so," Number One says, and she's nearly smirking.

"Just because Uhura said it and you like her better than you like Jim, doesn't make it true," Chris reminds her. Number One does like Jim, she just doesn't know how to admit to it. Well, Chris is pretty sure of that. She hadn't, originally, been such a huge fan of the notion of Jim, inasmuch as she has an opinion of anything Chris does. But her objections had died down over time until she'd started recommending nutritionally balanced lunches for him when Jim was in tenth grade.

"I am not here only to gossip with you," she says, and pushes a folder at him.

"I thought you didn't gossip."

"Jim is different," Number One says, as he signs neatly by the blue sticky notes and the silver stars. The woman is well-coordinated and for such a serious person has a highly unusual number of stickers. It took him about eight days to learn the parts of her system that he needed to know to function, and she's never seemed so keen on the idea of his learning anything else about what she does all day. "You missed one," she points out.

"So he's in love with Uhura?" asks Chris, going back two pages to find that, yes, he missed a star. He knows Jim's not. He couldn't tell anybody why, but he does know it.

"Marine biologist," Number One says, shaking her head at him.

"Even though he has the stupid hair?" Chris says, handing her back the folder and thinking that that can't be true. He'd have figured it out, and anyway, Jim's really terrible at falling in love. Jim - well, Chris doesn't like to think about Jim and sex much at the same time, because it's horrifying, but with Jim one sort of has to eventually - Jim likes sex. Jim likes people. He doesn't like falling in love, and if it's ever happened to him Chris wasn't looking. And Chris is pretty much always looking at Jim.

It's kind of been a problem for Number One, he thinks. Because the thing is, Chris would do anything, give anything up for Jim. He knows it. He knows, too, that Number One is the thing he gave up. She's been with him since she was in her twenties - young and efficient and just out of the worst marriage in history. She stayed with him and he thinks that, at some point, he fell in love with her. He asked her to dinner, even. Got the damn suit on and twitched his way through tying his tie. But that was the night Winona Kirk called him to say her son was in jail thirty minutes from his house and could he bail Jim out and send him back home? He never went to dinner with Number One, and he didn't even really think about it again for a year. If it had looked like they were going to happen, for a couple days - well, more important things had happened instead, and he's still got his girl and his son, no matter how different it looks than it does for most people.

"He's not as superficial as we all pretend he is," Number One says, and takes the folder. She rarely stays to talk to him when she doesn't have something official to be doing in his office, so she leaves.

He looks down at his desk and not up at her leaving, because watching her leave would be perverted and strange and he is her boss.

~*~

The seventh day after Jim kisses Spock by accident and then Spock very purposefully keeps kissing Jim is the child's eighteenth birthday (Jim considers giving him the gift of calling him by his name, but decides that he still looks like he's seven and so can't have that). This is something Sulu has been excited about for weeks and Jim, vaguely, remembered that morning and so he fished out some of his spare liquor from under the bed (Spock cast a glance at the array of bottles, from where he was sitting looking calm and tempting on his own bed, and then commented that if Jim could organize those there was really no reason he couldn't see to it that his books were alphabetized). Chris is looking over Spock's adventures in forensic accounting and what might have been corporate espionage, and trying to figure out what he could do about it, and if it changed what he wanted Jim to do (which, apparently, is to sit on his damn hands and wait for something terrible to happen). Jim has really nothing to do on the child's birthday, except for his normal things which keep him busy but not as busy as he wants to be.

Spock helps with that.

Spock presses him up against the fridge in the galley when Jim's stumbling his way through making breakfast and everyone else is either asleep or Scotty and thus not likely to emerge. He kisses Jim like there's a prize at the end (or like there's any way Spock won't get the prize the first time it even seems like he's trying), which is great, and actually a good start to any day. And then Spock disappears to help Scotty rewire the scuba radios (which Scotty fixed so very well that, apparently, they don't actually function as walkie-talkies. They are, however, flashlights now). It was Jim's idea to send Spock to supervise, so he has no one to blame but himself when Spock then retreats belowdecks. Bones, when he appears, criticizes Jim's breakfast but still gives Jim some of his preciously hoarded bacon (which he mostly only prepares when he's hungover or because he's mad at someone and wants to reinforce that they had lost their bacon privileges; Jim doesn't really care which it was as long as he still has his bacon privileges).

But then, midway through a conversation with Bones about whether or not it's reasonable to stock morphine just in case Jim suddenly develops an allergy to all modern anesthetics, the child shows up and haltingly, blushing, accent in its full force, asks if it would be all right if he perhaps used the satellite phone to make a call home to his previously unmentioned girlfriend.

There is actually nothing Jim could have done to lie to Uhura about that, as she is the keeper of the phone, and once three people know anything, everyone else is going to find out. It's like it's something in the air. Or, alternately, like someone had told Bones, who, in another life, could have been a fabulous gossip columnist.

Sulu steals Jim's best tequila and gets weepily drunk on Jim's bed. That means that instead of getting all wrapped up in Spock and devoutly hoping that tonight is the night someone takes his pants off, he consolingly pats Sulu on the back until he's all wept out and asleep.

He realizes later that he's sort of awful at that part of being someone's friend.

"He's only eighteen, he would have been a lousy lay anyway," in particular, probably just made Sulu whimper louder. It would have made Jim feel better.

But like half an hour after that, Sulu falls into a sad, depressed sleep. He sleeps like the fucking dead when he's drunk, so on the bright side, Sulu's hangover isn't really even a problem until two days later. He'd started drinking at about three, but by the time he finally passed out for good it's past one and Spock had announced his intention to bunk down in the unearthed bed of the executive suite if Jim wasn't going to kick Hikaru out at about eleven. That means Jim gets Spock's bed, which smells really distractingly of Spock, and so he goes to find Uhura, who is already in bed and makes space for him without asking any questions. He curls around her, and she's all warm, but she isn't distracting. Just cozy.

"Haven't seen you in a while," she comments, because he probably wouldn't like her as much if she possessed the common decency not to prod at his personal life when she thinks he's maybe having one.

"Wanna sleep," he mutters into her neck. "Fucking Sulu's all heartbroken and the child's having fucking phone sex and there is nothing right in this world, so I'm gonna go to sleep now."

"Is this the thing where you're not getting any and you're frustrated with everyone and you're going to bother me about it until I join you in sadness?"

"You're a mean, mean lady." Because, mostly, she has no idea how true that statement is. And there's no way he can go wake Spock up, because Spock'll just get all bitchy about it, and doesn't really cuddle until he's been unsatisfactorily fondled into submission. Well, it's satisfying. There's just every possibility it could be exponentially more satisfying. Which is not something he's thinking about in bed with Uhura, because she's Uhura.

"Yeah, but it's my bed and I can make you leave if I want to, so be nicer to me."

"I've always got Bones."

"Kicks."

"Fuck you," Jim says.

"It's not my fault. And why can't you bunk down with Spock?"

"Not allowed to screw the marine biologist," he says, virtuously, and rolls onto his back since it has become clear that while he's there he has to talk to her. She sits up and examines him, slowly.

"You know that's never actually stopped you for more than a week and a half, before?"

"And you've held out longer when, exactly? It's just that since Gaila -"

"Gaila was really sweet about it, Jim, and I think she left more because you wouldn't do it again than because you broke her heart and made her crazy. Even you can't twist it to make that traumatizing. And I held out three weeks with the first one, and the second one doesn't bear speaking about anyway."

"Shut up, stop knowing me, I'm going to sleep."

She actually lets him think that might happen for a few minutes, though when he rolls onto his side she stays stubbornly on her stomach, not touching him in a single bed, which is kind of a skill in itself.

"You know, Spock likes you more than he likes other people."

"Shut up."

"I think it wouldn't take much effort to get him into bed, you know, if you wanted to. It'd be hot, right?"

"OK, first off all," because he was clearly not sleeping, though he doesn't turn to face her in the hopes that she'll realize this. "You can't talk about casual sex because you are physically incapable of having it, as we all learned last year, so stop trying now. It's very embarrassing for you." Jim really had approved of Uhura and Bones. And then there'd been this whole thing where they both realized that it wasn't going anywhere but orgasms, which was apparently a problem for some people (Jim pretended to get it, he mostly didn't) and so now they don't fuck anymore, which they seemed to be enjoying.

"I was trying to be your guy friend."

Uhura really thinks he's kind of deficient in a lot of ways, and apparently one of those ways is that he has no male friends who will talk to him about sex. Which is kind of true, but not because he doesn't have male friends. He's got Bones who is on this sort of anti-sex kick where he's either sworn himself to celibacy or is being celibate by default because the only things on Earth he likes are his little girl and his medical practice and he can't find a third thing, other than Uhura, to like in a way where he can have sex with it (one day, Jim'll find him jerking off on the New England Journal of Medicine, but that day is at least three months off). Sulu can't really deal with promiscuity in the specific. Some faceless girl, yes, he'll absolutely help Jim get her talking to him in a bar, but if it's anyone they know, Sulu gets this little kicked puppy look. Besides, Sulu has enough issues of his own to be dealing with at this point, with the jailbait and all. Jim has this theory that Scotty is either asexual or has unnatural relations with his engines that Jim never wants to know about (well, he wants to know, but he doesn't want to remember very clearly in the morning) and he's pretty sure Chris'd kill him for asking the child for advice, if Jim didn't do it himself first. But he did not need Uhura to be his guy friend. He needs her to be a sleeping warm body so that he can get some rest.

Also, none of his guy friends were freaks who knew fucking everything despite Jim's best attempts to keep some stuff secret.

"I appreciate the effort?"

"Good."

"Second, why are you encouraging me?"

"You haven't been in here in a week."

"Yeah?"

"Which means you've been sleeping in your room."

"It's warmer, I figured you were fine without me."

"It means you're not avoiding Spock anymore," Uhura tells him, and she's doing this thing she does, where she'll notice stuff that nobody else notices, or put it together in a way that nobody else really would think to do. With other people, she'll just come out with whatever her final conclusion was - other people would have had to start this conversation with "I think you're going to end up fucking the new marine biologist too," but Jim's never been other people. He loves that she's in his life and in his head, because he didn't really have friends like her (or, Bones, but Bones is something else again) before he was on the Enterprise. But it still scares him, a little, that she can get into these places he didn't decide to let her go, even if he knows that maybe he would have wanted her there, or needed her there. Uhura understands that and she doesn't pull her psychic act with him, she just tells him what she thinks and why she thinks it and gives him about six seconds to work through it before she's telling him what he should do next.

"I was never avoiding Spock."

"Captain. You told me you were avoiding Spock so you wouldn't have sex with him."

"OK, fine, educate me on my life. I mean, there's clearly nothing to do around here but spend all day thinking about me and my mental well being and my naked body."

"I've seen your naked body, I have pictures of your naked body. I don't dwell on it. And this took me about eight minutes this morning while Spock was making my coffee, it wasn't my whole day."

The pictures were a horrible mistake, and one day she will leave him alone with her laptop and he will erase them from the face of this Earth. She'll get less vigilant, or less sober and he will make it happen. The sombrero, he decided, actually made it a lot worse. And it had been outside in Alaska where it was cold and rum had never been his friend. Uhura, maybe, had only been pretending to be his friend so that he couldn't fire her for being in possession of the pictures.

"But here's what I think," she says, "and I'm right. I think that you said you were going to have to hide here so you wouldn't have sex with Spock, or try to and then get shot down. But that was before the fact that you're just a little deranged worked for you and then suddenly he's your best friend - which, how do you make that happen? You spend two weeks seizing up every time there's a boat-shaped cloud and then people who previously wanted you dead sleep with you."

"I still don't know why that clear and calculated strategy didn't work on you," he grumbles.

"Because I think you're mostly kind of funny when you're doing it. I mean, tragic and very fucked up, but funny. If you won't tell me why you do it I'm just gonna make fun of it until you give me a reason not to." She pulls him onto his back and kisses him on the forehead.

"Figure me out on your own if you're so goddamned smart."

"You're not as complex as you think you are, Jim," she tells him, and smiles, and he shakes his head. If she knows what the hell's going on his head when he's freaking out, he doesn't want to know that. "But, the actual point is not that you have issues, it is that you slept in your own bed for seven nights running. You went there early for three. So, I think you're having sex with Spock."

"Am not," and he wasn't even lying.

"So you don't want to? That would be weird because you want to have sex with everything capable of consent." He can't really deny that, pathetically, and so he doesn't. "If Spock had shot you down you wouldn't sleep in the same room as him anymore," she decides, after a moment's thought. "Though, if he ever does shoot you down, and you're not really emotionally invested in it, can I have video?"

Jim doesn't think Spock's the kind of guy who is capable of shooting someone down in quite the way she's picturing. Spock would break up with someone, and then about six days later they'd figure out that's what he'd meant. Whether or not Spock would do this on purpose, Jim isn't quite sure.

"I do not get shot down."

"I shot you down," she points out.

"I didn't try very hard with you, really," Jim answers (which is a lie, sort of, he wasn't allowed to try very hard because she is scary and Chris loves her and Number One approves of her, and so he could never have been rid of her).

"Wait, did you just - Jim, are you emotionally invested? Is this you building up to a relationship?" She drawls the word in her best imitation of Joanna McCoy - or maybe she's still trying to be his guy friend and has decided to be Bones to do that. He can't really tell. Her Southern accent or whatever the hell she's trying is for shit, though.

He tries to pretend that she's not speaking a language he understands (this has happened before and is absolutely never out of the question entirely) and fakes sleep while she prods at him for a full five minutes because there's this very small possibility that that's true and that's why he's letting Spock be in charge of kissing, and why he's really good at sex but exceptionally awful at this thing he's doing with Spock.

The small part of his brain that wasn't concerned with that horrifying realization was really busy wondering why Uhura had to tell him about his feelings. It was stupid and he honestly had thought he was more aware than that.

~*~

Spock believes everyone hears some part of Jim's conversation with the Senator - he paces, frantically, throughout the entire thing and covers most of the ship in the doing of it. Only Spock, sitting beside Jim in the lab when the phone originally rings, is there for the entirety of it. He is struck, first, by how positive Jim seems - hopeful and proud and pleased all at once. Spock forgets that initial happiness, though, in the fall of Jim's face, afterwards.

"What the hell do you mean it's not enough?" Jim asks, and that's when he springs from the chair, and starts wandering around the small lab, picking up things Spock would prefer he didn't touch and putting them down when he remembers this. "It's fucking everything we need to prove that Narada owns the Kobayashi Maru. And if they bought a whaler I think it's fairly safe to say that they are engaged in whaling." There's a long pause, and Spock wants more than anything to be able to hear the other side of this conversation. He has only met the Senator twice - once at his interview, once when he left for Seward, but Spock imagines from what he has heard of the senator that he would not want to be making Jim look like this. Now quietly desperate, then angry, suddenly, and Jim seems to be almost clinging to anger, his whole face clenched and the hand not pressing the phone to his ear in a fist by his side.

"Chris," is the last thing Spock hears before Jim leaves the room, feet falling heavily on the stairs leading up to the open decks, and he is briefly concerned that if the Senator continues with this conversation, the satellite phone will be a casualty. Though he often suspects Jim of a great deal more sense that Jim likes to pretend he has, Spock decides this is enough of a reason to follow Jim.

Pavel joins him in following Jim and they pass Nyota as she leaves the bridge, apparently having been sent away by the captain. Scott is piloting but also departs as they enter, presumably thinking that his position has been taken and he can return to the radios which he destroyed (though very ingeniously) and which it will take the rest of the day to put back together. Nyota seems concerned, but continues with her day and Scott seems not to notice them at all, except to nod briefly at Jim.

Pavel treats it like theater, and Spock wants to send Pavel away, but he has no way of telling Pavel that this should be what - should be Spock's? Should be private?

It is theatrical - Spock gleans that his proof has not been enough for Pike, and that the senator has told Jim that the captain's job is not to discover the origins of the ship or to stop it but to observe only (this last phrase is actually loud enough that Spock can hear it quite clearly each time the Senator repeats it, even standing five feet behind Jim to avoid his windmilling arms). There's a brief diatribe which Spock surmises is about danger from Jim's curt response and it all ends with some sort of admonishment that Jim takes very poorly. It is at some point around the very end of the conversation that McCoy has joins them, though he is lurking outside the bridge for reasons Spock does not quite understand. Jim turns the phone off and sets it down and the sound of it on the console seems final, in some way.

Jim's face is utterly destroyed. It has been a half-hour conversation (Pavel lost interest some five minutes ago and had left for his room, where he has been since Sulu made a strategic retreat to his own room after only a brief stop at sickbay to collect ibuprofen and blame Jim for making him an alcoholic. Pavel spends most of his days with Sulu, since Spock has little use for him and the filing system has begun to manage itself). Jim doesn't turn to Spock, afterwards, just stares out the wide windows of the bridge onto the ocean, for a few moments.

Spock wants, partially, to leave and thinks that despite the doctor's multitude of deficiencies, he does know Jim well, and has known him for longer. If he isn't on the bridge then perhaps Spock should not be either. And there is a small, cowardly part of Spock that wants to get out of the line of this fire. There is another part, less acknowledged, which is hissing insistently that his place is here. So he turns the decision to Jim, who perhaps will know where he should go. But he has no idea how to approach Jim - Spock has, in all honesty, no idea what he is to the captain. Their one conversation on the topic had been inconclusive in many ways, and Jim is distracting because Spock is allowed to touch and discover him, which has never helped his focus. He cannot resist touching Jim (or, more accurately, he could, he simply sees no reason to, whenever he is reasonably certain that they are alone). This makes conversation nearly impossible when it is not strictly related to their work, and sometimes, even then.

Jim's hand begins to tap on the console in front of him, not really rhythmically and Spock realizes that if he and Jim were merely coworkers he would have nothing to say and if they were - partners, he supposes would be the best term for a committed relationship - then he would have no experience at this point and would be simply waiting on cues Jim would be no more likely to give him than he is now. Since they are - he is, at least, certain of this - friends, he sees no reason not to simply inquire as to what Jim wants, and then to do that. It seems like the right thing to do and if it also happens to move the burden of responsibility onto Jim, Spock thinks that on this occasion he does not mind. He might distract Jim with work, but Spock has done none to distract Jim with, since it is Spock's own work that has caused the distress, and his others studies had fallen to the wayside in his research of the Kobayashi Maru. His attempts to focus on anything else, professionally, have been pitifully unsuccessful (as they were this morning before Jim interrupted), and only the simple logic of wiring has been enough to focus him.

"I could leave," Spock offers quietly. "If you would prefer solitude."

"No, stay, you've been following me like you want something," Jim answers, and collapses into the command chair. "It's not like I've got anything else to fucking do."

"I do not want anything," Spock answers.

"We've talked about the staring and how it's sexy and creepy but more on the disturbing side, generally?"

Spock is only rarely frustrated - he believes that there are few problems that cannot be solved with sufficient dedication, and he has endless wells of that from which to draw. When Jim misinterprets his actions, as he has done now, thinking that Spock wants something from him when Spock much more wants something for him, he is frustrated by Jim.

"I followed you because wanted to help you, in whatever way I might able to," he provides, in case that was not clear. He does not imagine how it would not have been, but it seems to him sometimes he and Jim speak in dialects of the same language, and sometimes they are not even working with the same basic syntax that Spock had previously believed was native to all humans and which he had been so careful to learn so well, even when he felt it did not come naturally to him. It is not that communication has ever been easy for him (and it is easy with Jim, so deceptively simple), but it has never been so hard as it is when they do not understand each other.

"Real sweet of you, but I can take care of myself," Jim says. "I'm just pissed, is all, I'll work it out. Go be useful if you don't have anything you need me for. Bones, you heard that? Go," Jim shouts, and the doctor, shaking his head, goes. "Unless you wanna -" Jim adds once McCoy's gone, leaning back in the chair and opens his arms, making his intentions quite clear without the lascivious leer he usually affects. Spock considers this - the bridge is well trafficked, between Nyota's equipment, Sulu's actual employment (if he ever surfaces, Spock supposes), Doctor McCoy's eventual boredom in an empty sickbay and Pavel's filing being tucked neatly into a corner (the only area that shows any signs of organization).

The idea of touching Jim is never entirely unappealing and he regrets, again, their total lack of restraint before settling gingerly into Jim's lap, straddled across his legs and closer to Jim than he believes himself capable of being without kissing him (it is a more romantic thought than he has ever had about another partner, and he wonders, briefly, if the romance novels masquerading as military adventure he has been filching from Doctor McCoy, having exhausted all other reading material aboard, have had some deleterious affect on his mental faculties).

Jim is in the process of reeling him in closer - something to which he does not object in the slightest - when Spock pulls back, just slightly. Forehead still pressed to Jim's, he feels obligated to warn his captain of the dangers of their current situation.

"There will only be twelve point eight minutes, statistically, before either Sulu or Nyota must return to their stations and only eighteen point seven before Doctor McCoy will come back to ascertain your mental wellbeing. Which, I should add, I feel will not be best served by taking your frustrations out on my body."

"You really need to stop being all Freudian and just ask me to be rough with you, and I definitely do not need twelve point eight minutes, if you know what I mean." Spock rolls his hips. "Fuck."

"I cannot imagine a person who would not know what you mean, Jim. Though it does not sound that impressive, to be honest with you," Spock tells him and Jim clasps his hips in response.

"You asshole," Jim says, after a moment, happy if not laughing.

Then, Spock is caught it is the play of Jim's lips on his , Jim's hands on his hips and his groin against Jim's, his own hands in Jim's hair and perhaps, somewhere, the notion that this chair was not made for two grown men and he might fall.

This is, of course, when Doctor McCoy chooses to make his blustering re-entrance (at least seven minutes before Spock felt anyone was likely to find business on the bridge) - the sound of his footfalls blocked by the high winds, something neither of them had considered. Spock becomes aware of his presence only when Jim pushes Spock off his lap and runs after the doctor, and Spock is left alone, and after a moment's indecision, uses the intercom to summon Scott and returns himself to his room.

~*~

Jim normally likes talking to Bones. Talking to Bones is fun - talking to Bones, even when Chris had been in the hospital and he'd been kind of blaming doctors in general for it, had always been a good thing. Today, not so much.

"You said you wouldn't," Bones thunders, from where he has planted himself against his examination table, arms crossed. It's like the wrath of some angry, Georgian god and Jim does not like being the target of any of it. He's standing in the doorway, wondering if he should take this chance to run away. "Jim, you cannot drive another one off. This one is good."

"You hate Spock," Jim feels obliged to remind him. It's not like Bones needs an excuse to get angry, but sometimes if Jim gives him an excuse not to be before he gets too into his current snit, he'll come out of it. "So if I drove him off why would that matter to you? Actually, why are you being so fucking weird about this?"

Bones normally just mopes until the marine biologist goes crazy. Because normally he just assumes that whatever's going on is Jim being kind of a whore and has to leave because Bones has issues. Jim only mostly knows what these issues are because he thinks knowing any more than that about what goes on in Bones' head would be damaging. He's not even entirely sure why he followed Bones down here just - maybe it's just that this thing with Spock doesn't feel like fucking the marine biologist, and so he can't treat it like that. There's still no reason for Jim to be defending himself and no reason for Bones to be making him (even if, maybe, technically, Jim's down here of his own free will). Spock's not the kind who goes crazy (and, yes, Jim has said that the past four times, but he was right at least one and a half of those times) and Bones also mostly gave up on making him stop fucking them after the third one. Anybody else, he'd have kept kissing them and winked at Bones and waited a couple days to approach him again. This is another thing.

"Yeah," Bones says. "But you don't hate him. Last one you liked like this was Carol, Jim. That didn't end really any better than any of the others, and actually maybe was a little worse. You think this is going to go well?"

"And on that note - how did you not learn from that? Casual sex that goes horribly wrong is fine, but Jim, my room's right fucking next to yours and that was not a first kiss I just saw, but you definitely haven't gotten laid in months, which means you're taking it slow. So what the hell?"

"Maybe we're fucking like crazy in the lab."

"Spock's too tidy, he'd never let you."

"Maybe I'm letting him," Jim tries to leer. Normally Bones can be distracted with sex, and he could start giving his little STD talk, and Jim could think about how he's supposed to make this up to Spock. But it's not happening because Bones is still giving him determined-and-judgmental eyes rather than exasperated-and-judgmental eyes.

"He'd never."

"We do it while you sleep."

"You haven't had sex and you've been at it for how long?" Now he's gone all soft and medical. Soft and medical is not a favorite of Jim's, particularly, because it can build up to I-did-my-undergrad-in-psychology-and-yes-I-sucked-at-it-but-I-still-know-more-about-your-psyche-than-you-do, which is his very least favorite thing about Bones.

It is in Jim's best interest, he decides, to never open his mouth again.

"Over or under forty-eight hours?"

This game kind of sucks, Jim reflects, and does not answer.

"Over," Bones decides. "Lord, Jim. What is this?"

"Maybe I took a vow of chastity." OK, so anyone who's ever met him knew the plan to never open his mouth again wasn't going to last. He thinks he did admirably well considering that all his willpower has been taken up by not fucking Spock.

"You did not."

"Maybe Spock did."

"I know his sexual history better than I know yours - and no I am not telling you a damn thing." That's a little tragic - though Jim can mostly guess and has this idea that he could probably ask Spock and get a list of sexual partners and a rating of the experiences on a scale of one to ten. "Jim, as your doctor-"

"As a nosy busybody who should really just get porn and stop worrying about my sex life," Jim corrects, because it's true (the STD talk tends to start with "as a concerned citizen who does not want to treat patient zero of the next plague when it brews itself up in your nethers" so he's pretty sure he didn't just cut off his only hope of salvation now that Bones is all entrenched in anger).

"As your friend, Jim, what the hell?"

"Do I have to know right now?"

Bones examines him, tilts his head and raises his eyebrow and generally performs his little thinking face gymnastics which mean he thinks he knows something that no one else wants him to know (Jim has always been kind of glad Bones and Uhura never got past fucking like bunnies, because their kids wouldn't have actually been psychic, but they'd have been able to figure out too much for their own good and would have been very proud of it and probably a really cute blight upon the human race in general).

"You know what this looks like, Jimmy?" The sad thing might be that Jim gets that this looks like a relationship with meaning and substance and even he can't give very many reasons why it's not (you have to tell people about those for them to count and you proably get at least occassional sex being the main two).

"I kinda do," he admits, sullenly.

The day, at that point, is completely unsalvageable and Jim decides when he leaves that he is going to make all new friends and only keep Spock, because it's not Spock's fault that he makes Jim do new things which scare the fuck out of the perceptive people around him, so the only solution can be to accidentally leave the perceptive people behind in Hawaii. This will leave him with Scotty, who would not question anyone for having sex right in front of him unless they were obscuring his view of the engines and Sulu, who will probably still be drunk in six months if he keeps going the way he has been and won't be in a position to do anything to annoy Jim.

"Jim, last one like this left with your kid," Bones calls out after him, which doesn't help at all. And before Jim can even turn around to hit Bones very hard, Bones is sighing.

"I never told you that," Jim says, and he can't decide if he feels worse that Bones knows (because, OK, he knows it's never a story that he comes out of looking any good) or that Bones knows and Bones didn't tell him.

"Where the hell do you think she got the pregnancy test, kid?" Bones says, which, OK, fair point. Jim had never really considered that. "And I was waiting for you to tell me."

"For a year?" Jim's kind of incredulous. Bones has the patience of a high-strung toddler, possibly one on methamphetamines.

"Doctor-patient confidentiality," Bones says, and it's kind of clear he's reaching. Reaching very far and very quickly, and falling somewhat short.

"Bullshit," Jim says, and he's trying to be mad, but mostly he's not. Rock and a hard place, or something, and lying to Bones never has sat well with him. Being lied to by Bones is up there too (Bones is the guy who told him Chris might not know who he was when he woke up and the guy who snuck him in a flask a couple days after that, Jim expects honesty from him).

"Just looking out for you," Bones says, and he says it in that low way that he'll say serious, true things. All growly and rough like he's been crying or something. "I thought you'd tell me."

"Sorry I didn't," Jim says, because he's never actually be able to muster anger with Bones. It'd be too easy, or something, with Bones spending most of his life like he's just been shot, to do some real damage. So Jim doesn't. And he is sorry.

"Yeah, I know," Bones says, and doesn't add that he is, too. Because he's probably not, honestly. Bones is weird, ethically. Still a good guy though. "Just don't let it go like that again."

"I really doubt it's going to," he says, and tries not to think too hard about a pregnant Spock, because it makes his spine itch.

"You know what I meant," Bones laughs and boots him out of the sickbay. Could've gone worse and Jim's kind of forgotten to be angry.

Jim honestly suspects nothing else could get worse unless the ship capsizes.

~*~

The first time Nyota Uhura met Jim Kirk, she told him he was incompetent. He told her she had a nice ass. That was two years ago and he was new to being a captain and she was new to being out of her nasty little basement linguistics lab.

It went downhill for two months from there, and then one morning she woke up in his bed with the worst hangover ever and all her clothes on; he made her an omelette. They still don't know why that happened or how, and no one will tell them, but after that they both decided they were supposed to be friends. It works out pretty well, generally. She doesn't take his shit, and he just sits there and takes hers when she needs him to.

When she comes into Spock's lab where Jim's mostly loitering and hoping Spock'll give up on light pollution statistics that are so sketchy as to be unusable and refocus on feeling Jim up, she knocks.

Uhura does not knock on doors, not ever. But she does this time (which would make him suspect that Bones had already told everyone, except he can't possibly have because it's only been about twenty minutes and that's about how long it takes Bones to have an ethical dilemma and then decide to tell Sulu so he'll get the blame instead). She knocks on the door and she pulls him aside instead of just saying whatever she has to say and then moving on with her life. They've got very few secrets onboard because it takes a metric fuckton less energy to swear everyone to secrecy than it does to make them not tell each other things.

All of these things are bad signs, but Jim's still at a point then where he's decided that really nothing else can go wrong today because he can't have that much bad karma short of murdering kittens in cold blood, which he has never done. He thinks maybe Bones just got over it faster than he maybe should have and now they've teamed up to try and talk Jim out of doing anything with Spock (which, Jim thinks, in the half second he has before she opens her mouth, is totally unfair since he's not doing anything and it was less than twelve hours ago that she was mad at him for that).

"I just lost the signal from Red," she says, quietly.

"He's sitting still, whatever, probably hitting on hot girl whales," because Jim gets that they're all tense, but even he knows that the signal stopping is more than normal. Migration is actually lengthened by periods of socialization, and it always has been. This can drive Jim crazy and make him consider taking up whale-herding, since he thinks that, on the whole, they're too easily distracted and should just fucking move it so he can get off the ship and compile data and scuba dive and do things that aren't sitting on the bridge staring mindlessly at clouds. Or harassing Spock, which is probably his new favorite hobby, but he thinks he could find whole new ways of doing it on dry land.

"No, Captain, I mean I've got nothing. Not like he shook it off nothing, not like he's still nothing, like he has completely ceased to exist nothing, and it's all I've had for the past fifteen minutes so it's not a dead zone."

"Why the fuck didn't you tell me sooner?" Jim says (though he knows why she didn't; their first year out they hit a couple dead zones and it was ten minutes of pulling out their own hair before poof whale, so now they wait twenty before telling anyone, except it's only been fifteen now). "Wait, no, why are you telling me now?" He's already moving for the bridge, because it could just be a malfunction in the system, and he knows it just as well as she does, but he's a little more creative with it, generally speaking, so he could make that work again.

There's something tight in his throat telling him it's not that and he flashes back to the first time Chris went into cardiac arrest two days after the accident and it feels just like that. He tamps it down, though, because not only does he not believe in that shit, it screws with him and makes him less effective and right now he needs to be useful.

Spock quietly sets down his slides and follows them, clearly listening in and clearly not caring that Jim knows it.

"I've been getting chatter from the Kobayashi Maru," she says, softly, like she's trying not to disturb a small animal. They're in one of the cramped staircases belowdecks, though, and it echoes in the damp space. "It's pretty vague, but there was something about radios and something about preparing a harpoon and I just thought you should know."

The next fifteen minutes are kind of a blur - he knows he fucks with the tracking until he's well and truly satisfied that it's all working. He knows that at some point Bones stumbles up the steps and grips his shoulders and tells him he's hyperventilating.

He knows he tells Uhura that she should have figured this out days ago, and instead of reminding him that she's really fucking good at her job and slapping him, she just nods and steps out of the bridge. He knows that Spock mumbles to him that he'll have to apologize for that when it's all fine.

He knows that Spock is always there, handing him the tools he needs and reminding him not to be an asshole and taking over the controls (thankfully set to autopilot because he doesn't really know if Spock knows how to drive the fucking thing and Sulu's still drunk and there are other things for Jim to be doing, which Scotty needs to help him with).

He snaps back in at the moment when the bow hits a rush of red water and he knows and he can't shake that knowledge no matter how hard he tries, and he knows that his job is to prove it and get something incriminating and make this look as bad and hurt as much as it possibly can. But he feels outgunned and outwitted and like he's failed, and like he wants to get in bed and probably never get out again, but he can't.

Spock still stands behind him.

~*~

Chris guesses that at least the ship didn't go down.

But it's six hours later and Jim still hasn't called him back - he made Uhura do it, once, for a daily check in that Jim's religious about. She said everything was fine, and he learned long ago that unless he knows different it'll just drive him crazy to worry. He has to operate on the assumption that Jim's fine, because if he didn't, then the times when Jim does turn up passed out in a ditch or wakes up in jail might just kill him. When Jim's done being angry that Chris isn't authorizing some sort of holy war because Sarek's kid called a couple law firms, he'll let Chris know.

Jim never doesn't call Chris back, eventually, so it's just a waiting game. Either he'll want Chris to apologize, he'll want to keep fighting about forensic accounting and why he should get to sink anything he thinks might be a whaler, or he'll want to make it up to Chris. There's this part of Chris that is proud that Jim's being a stubborn jackass with him, because he knows that he matters to Jim and maybe this means that his son is finally getting that he's not going to be allowed to go anywhere no matter how pissed Chris gets. Maybe it's that Jim's smart enough to know without questioning it more than he absolutely has to that there's nothing they can do.

They're a small nonprofit - they observe and they try to scare whalers off by being there when they can - they don't have guns and they can't stop anything if the people doing it are shameless enough.

Chris wrote his dissertation on a murder a lot of people suspect was due to a bribe by Narada and by Nero. He knows that Nero is shameless enough. He killed Jim's father and it's taking every fiber of Chris' being and probably most of Number One's energy to keep him from ordering Jim home to get Jim further away from Nero. He wants Jim here so Chris can sit outside his door and be assured that there is absolutely nothing getting to Jim, which, yes, he did a little during the custody clusterfuck. He's not actually sure how well it'll work in the chair, but he's really determined.

And it can't be a coincidence. There's no way it was George and then it just happened to be Jim. This is about Jim, it's about hurting Jim, and getting to him because the only thing that Nero's ever done that anyone even almost noticed was killing George.

He can't tell Jim that though, because Jim is stubbornly uninterested in his father's death and Chris's work about it, and he's never read the damn dissertation (something he has in common with pretty much everyone but Chris, Chris' thesis advisor and Winona Kirk). Chris is happy with that. Let Jim think it was police brutality and be the angry young man who hates the system and has a sealed juvenile record as long as Chris' leg (when he used to able to extend them). Just don't let him be vengeful and angry and unsafe, that's all. He once tried to get Jim to read it - when he was trying to get Jim to go to school, to show him that he could do something meaningful there, too.

Jim burnt his copy in an actually pretty characteristic show of passive-aggressive pyromania (only Jim could manage passive while setting shit on fire).

And taking action right now isn't wise for them as a business, either. If something happens - Chris isn't a praying man, but god forbid, if something happens - they can make a big deal of it. If Jim can hold it together for long enough; but then, Chris knows he can hold it together for that long. It's how much longer after that he gets worried about. There's McCoy and there's Uhura but there's not much beyond that holding Jim up, and there's this part of Chris that's convinced he's the only one who can do it.

He's not thinking any of that, when the phone rings; he's thinking that it's about damn time Jim called, and that's how he answers.

What he gets is; "You better not have fucking known this was happening, Chris." Jim sounds ripped apart. It's terrifying. Chris doesn't quite know what to do with it.

"What, Jimmy?' He never calls him Jimmy - he had tried it, for a while at first, and he knows he did it just after he woke up, when he was pretty strung out. But Jim's not a big fan of him doing it, for whatever reason, and so he mostly restrains himself. Jim shocks it out of him, this time.

"We lost the signal on Red half an hour ago, somebody jammed it," Jim says, tersely. "Uhura got it back, because she's fucking amazing, but by the time she had there was no fucking point because they did it right in front of us Chris, we were sitting on him and they still fucking - God, Chris I can see the fucking Kobayashi Maru right now and there's not a fucking thing I can do."

"They did what?" He asks, but the hand not crushing the phone to his ear is white-knuckled on the armrest of his chair and he knows what is coming next and he will kill someone over this if Jim doesn't get them first. And then there's this part of his brain that's asking if they got pictures, if they can prove it and make it stick, if they can still do their jobs when they're all this attached and Jim who gets more and more like a drill sergeant the more scared he gets is so fucking gone that he's sounding as angry-scared-lost as he is.

"Red," Jim says, and his voice is stiff and clinical - Chris strains his ears, looking for the familiar muttering in the background. Jim never gets left alone when they're all the way out and the only one on the ship who can stay quiet is Sulu, who tends to just take off when Jim gets like this. There's nothing. He hopes, briefly, that Jim hasn't locked them out and then decides, in vain, that he should probably just hope somebody's got a lockpick. "Was harpooned by the Kobayashi Maru. They'll haul him in the next fifteen minutes and don't fucking worry, I'll get you the pictures you need." And then he hangs up.

Chris calls him back and gets Nyota, who sounds more scared than anything else and tries to give the phone to Jim who, yes, is locked in the bridge with Spock and McCoy.

"He's not doing his thing, though," she assures him (for a certain measure of assuring which includes not feeling any better). "He's just really angry at everyone and everything."

"Except Spock and McCoy?"

"I think Leonard too, but especially you," there's the sound of her settling on the ground. "If I tell you to give him a couple days, that's not going to do any good, is it?'

"You want me to give Jim Kirk time to stew and you think that'll make it better?"

"I think it'll help your hearing," she corrects. "He's working through a thing on his own, and he's doing as well as he ever could have, Senator. We're all going to do the best we can. But right now, your son is safe and healthy and couldn't hold a grudge for more than week against anyone he loves, what do you want him to do with your ship?"

Hiring her from her scary linguistics lab in the basement at NYU was probably the best thing he ever did, he reflects.

"Whatever Jim - whatever the captain wants," he corrects himself, rapidly. He hates this, but it can't just be about him and Jim. "I want one of you on the phone once an hour, if longer than that goes by and I don't hear from you, I swear to god I will airlift in Number One and she will take over and you can all swim to Hawaii. The second Jim's willing to speak to me, he's going to, I don't care what time of night it is and I don't care how drunk he is."

"He won't drink until we're through this," she says.

"Yeah, if you and Doctor McCoy could make that happen for me."

Those whales were the first things Jim ever cared about without a reason; the first things that didn't have to prove themselves to him over and over again, the first things he'd give to without expecting that they'd take more from him than he had (though maybe they did). Nyota might think that Jim's angry at everyone and everything, and that's probably true. He's probably a little mad at Chris for telling him to basically sit on his hands and wait for something to happen (even if there was no way Jim could have stopped this, not if they're just fucking with them like this now). He also knows James Kirk, and he knows that all that's going through Jim's head right now is how much he's failed and how no one's going to forgive him for this one.

"Maybe," Uhura answers something he feels like he said eight days ago (already today's gone on forever and he's too wound up for it to end, except tomorrow will probably be awful as well). "Senator?"

"Yes?"

"Why did they have to show us like that?" She sounds young, younger than he's ever heard the confident, brash, brilliant girl who took Jim down within five minutes of meeting him. She's twenty-eight, and she's the oldest person onboard (except Scott, who Chris could probably place between thirty and death, but no more accurately. And McCoy, but he gets too tied up in whatever stupid idea Jim's had to really count as a day older than Jim is.).

He wonders, not for the first time, how they're going to handle this and how impractical it would actually be to be airlifted in to just fix it.

 

~*~

It's not really the best idea to go anywhere near a mother and new calf, right after the birth - they shouldn't even have been able to sex Red until he was six weeks old, maybe more. But at that point, Gracie had spent most of her life around humans and had had really no negative feelings about the Enterprise. They'd watched Red's birth, and Jim had been in the water with them two weeks later. He's not one of those people who has a religious experience every time he's in the water with the whales (the first time yes; but after that it was just sort of cool, and most of the time he was there for some intensely pragmatic reason that precluded staring with doe-eyed wonder at anything). That time had been better than the first, better than pretty much anything.

Red was awesome and he was Jim's, because Jim made sure he got the life he deserved (even if technically Jim had not known he was doing it at the time). Jim realizes that he should probably only ever have the one kid, because holy God does he play favorites. With whales. Who probably don't care. But still. He had spent basically a month making excuses to get as close to Red and Gracie as he possibly could. He had photographed them and swum with them and spent so fucking long in the dinghy that their very first marine biologist had quit because she couldn't have access to any of the materials he was using and he possibly didn't let anyone else use the scuba gear because he was so greedy about every opportunity he could get. Also, he had slept with her their third night out and then ignored her for three weeks, but she didn't quit for five, so he thinks that was probably secondary.

He took a lot of pictures, and they went up on Chris' website, and they got a metric fuckton of press because everyone likes to put a really adorable face to a cause. Dealing with the press is, yes, Jim's job (well, Uhura runs interference, but he's the face people know at least a little bit), but that was the only time he was actually happy to do it, because he was proud of what he'd done.

Chris had been, too.

Right now, he's taking pictures of Red's body being hauled onto the deck of the Kobayashi Maru to be butchered, and he needs both hands for the camera, but there's McCoy beside him and Spock standing behind him - not touching, but close enough that Jim can feel the warmth of him and that there's this really bad temptation to just lean back and let Spock take the weight a while, because Spock could maybe deal with it and Jim feels like he's teetering on the edge of not being able to.

There are six harpoon marks.

There's no fucking way you need six if you aren't legally blind.

This killing was cruel and pointed, and to be doing this is broad daylight means that whoever the hell is up there is trying to show them something, or prove that they can get away with this.

Right now, Jim's mired in how he can make it so that they don't. The proof tying the Kobayashi Maru to Narada is good, but not perfect. He needs something concrete and he doesn't have it. And if he doesn't have that, he can fuck this ship up as much as he wants to, and it'll just happen again. And if they show the world that the IWC is fucking toothless, and so is every fucking research ship out there, then this is going to become a business. And, Christ. Jim can't go there.

He takes six more pictures. It's weird to think that Red's small, but in comparison to the ship he is and Jim should've been able to do something.

"It's not your fault, Jim," Bones says. He's said it maybe a hundred times. It's what he thinks Jim needs to hear (hell, it's what everyone but Spock seems to think Jim needs to hear, but Spock's pretty much stopped talking entirely, so maybe he's thinking it).

In the end, he takes eighty-six pictures before they can't get any more in high enough resolution to be useful. By the time he's done it's nearly eight and there's absolutely no light, and he's cold. McCoy's been and gone to call Chris a couple times and Spock's moved to stand next to Jim. Scotty's in the bridge getting them to Gracie as fast he possibly can, because it'll make Jim feel a hell of a lot better to be there.

"You should go inside," Spock advises, quietly. "You will get cold." It's the first thing he's said in maybe two hours. It's not what Jim would have expected, and yeah, he's in a t-shirt and he's fucking freezing, but he hadn't noticed that until Spock said it.

"I'll go get a blanket," he says, and knows it's unreasonable not to just go inside where it's reasonably warm and that probably Spock won't get why he won't . "I wanna stay out for a while, until we're on Gracie, OK? You should eat."

"I will get you a blanket," Spock says, "and also something to eat. The cereal in the second drawer, above the sink?"

"Um, no, additive," Jim thinks, though he can't remember which one. It's maybe the food coloring in the red ones? And hives? Bones and Chris know these things, and he knows not to go to restaurants and what will actually kill him. "The stuff in the drawer by the bulletin board is all mine." He doesn't want to eat, but he also knows (from some experience when he tried to send Spock out of the room right after they lost the signal) that Spock isn't actually going to do anything but exactly what he wants to do right now.

Spock leaves, first pressing a kiss to the back of Jim's neck that makes Jim shiver, but he couldn't say why. Spock comes back less than a minute later, this time carrying a large metal bowl.

"If you hurl yourself overboard, I will have to both fish you out and explain the whole incident to Senator Pike. Nyota advises me that I should tell you to keep this in mind, and I am also to remind you that she is not the enemy. Doctor McCoy has told me to tell you that people must know that you are allergic to wool before you ask them to bring you blankets, and Sulu has apparently made you popcorn," he holds out the bowl. Jim takes a moment to be deeply impressed that Sulu can even bear the sound of popcorn popping right now; Sulu's hangovers are epic.

"They're not pissed?"

"Not at you," Spock says, and comes back, pulls Jim closer towards him by the waist, one hand still holding the steel bowl. It smells like garlic dressing and Jim almost laughs; that would be Sulu's way of making him feel better. Sometimes it would've worked, too.

They will be pissed at him, though; it won't take them long to figure out that this was his fault. He spent like ten minutes being mad at Chris before he got there and realized he could have persuaded Chris to do something different, or he could have just been crazy and figured something out with that and done it anyway, or he could have gone further with Spock's research. He could have figured out that the only reason to go after tagged whales is if you really, really want to get noticed, and if you really want to get noticed it can't just be for hovering threateningly and giving Jim an ulcer.

"No one, Jim, is angry at you. Senator Pike has called six more times since you last spoke with him, I am to tell you that if you will just answer the phone and confirm you aren't having some sort of cardiac episode, he will leave you alone at least overnight."

"You're a pretty good messenger," Jim tells him. "You got anything you want to say?"

"I am making you a stir-fry; you should come inside to eat it if you do not want it to be cold." Jim shakes his head. He wants to be outside. This does not seem to please Spock, since he raises an eyebrow in what might be judgment.

"Go do that, and let go of me, we've got like ten minutes before Sulu decides that if he's heroically giving up his popcorn the least I can do for him is share, and then Bones'll be back from wherever he fucked off too."

"I find that I do not want to," Spock tells him.

"I'm not in the mood." He's trying not to be pissy because Spock's the only person who has stayed calm all day and Jim doesn't know what to do with that, but he's got Spock pressed up against him and warm and undemanding, he doesn't know what to do with that, not at all, except that he wants to burrow into the space between Spock's neck and shoulder and maybe never come out, or at least not until they figure out a way to make this better.

"Nor am I," Spock answers. "I felt that perhaps you would appreciate some physical comfort, if I was wrong, I apologize. I do, however, note that you are not going anywhere." Jim's not sure he could.

"People will see."

"Do you care?"

He should say yes, because he and Spock might still be a mistake that's gonna drive Spock off, and that'll only be worse if people know that it was more than one fuck that Jim managed to use to screw up the pretty good thing that they've got going onboard at the moment. He wants to say no, because this is getting to a point where all day he's been hanging onto the rhythm of Spock's breath like a lifeline and he needs to ask Uhura what the hell is happening in his head, because he sure as fuck doesn't know.

"I do not," Spock says, but begins to pull back.

"They figured it out anyway, right?'

"What is there to figure out?"

Jim doesn't know, and that's the thing he's putting aside just for a little while because he's almost entirely sure Spock will let him.

"I'm fucking freezing."

"Of course you are," Spock says, and clutches him a little tighter and then gives him the popcorn. It's gone cold, but not stale, which is actually how he likes it. He's pretty sure Sulu couldn't have timed it like that, but he knows Jim well enough to have maybe tried. "Perhaps if you stepped out of the wind," Spock advises, and then pulls away, one last time. "I will be back."

~*~

It's like they're all watching a funeral, Spock thinks. He is the chief mourner, though he doesn't know how he was put in the position. McCoy, Nyota and Pavel have assembled in the galley, and are watching him cook as if he is doing something fascinating. He's burnt himself with hot oil three times in the past ten minutes, and if he does it once more he is going to send them all to their rooms. He's almost entirely certain they would go.

No one is not jarred by this, no one is not a little scared. This does include Spock, who had to restrain himself from making sure that the peppers he's cutting are sliced perfectly evenly, with a ruler, something he has not had to do since he was a child making cookies with his mother (who could not cook; she forgot baking soda and added too much sugar and they caramelized, despite his careful measurements and to her puzzlement). But Spock is trying, desperately, to be balanced because no one else can. Uhura let herself be cowed by Jim, something he has never seen before, and has spent hours going over transcription copies on her laptop trying to see how she could have known that the Kobayashi Maru had meant to be predictable, had hidden itself only well enough to be plausible. McCoy is trying to be soothing, but he keeps leaving to fret at little things, and then coming back to try to chivvy them into bed as soon as the sun is down because he seems to have developed some sort of preoccupation with sleep deprivation. No one has gone yet, but this doesn't dissuade him. Sulu had stumbled out of his room in the middle of everything, realized there was nothing he could do, and stumbled directly back in - except, of course, when he emerged to make popcorn for Jim, nodding wisely to himself. Spock wonders if Sulu has finally found Scott's stash of Scotch, which has long been rumored to be in the executive suite but has never been found. Scott himself had disappeared to the engines initially and is now on the bridge, and they are traveling towards Gracie at a greater speed than Spock had been led to believe the Enterprise could achieve. Pavel is sitting in the galley and staring at them all, though he was - briefly - dispatched to the labs to rearrange some of Spock's slides, just to give him something to do with his day other than make coffee no one could bring themselves to drink.

Spock is not sure how much of what they feel is for Red and how much is for Jim. This is something entirely new for all of them, and though they have all done their jobs remarkably well (something he has told them, and something that the senator has told them, though they'll probably not believe it until it's their captain telling them so).

Jim isn't particularly in any state to be a captain for people, though. He's doing well with the ship, and that is all Spock wishes to ask of him. He is still surprised to find that he can offer Jim this measure of his own calm. Spock remains nervous, though. The rest of the job is the Senator's, unless Jim is expected to give interviews. Without something to do, surely eventually Jim will crash and need cushioning as he falls. Surely anyone would. If it does happen, Spock feels a keen certainty that his place is in cushioning that fall.

"What's he thinking?" Nyota asks him, disrupting the way the kitchen has been quiet except for the noises of the ship around them and the snapping of vegetable oil in the pan as Spock adds the peppers.

"You could ask him yourself," Spock advises, because some small part of him wants to keep Jim's brokenness for his own. But Nyota looks at him as if she's lost, which is such an alien expression on her face - so frequently determined, and nearly never looking for much outside of herself for that determination that he can't help but offer more, because it will be important to her. "He thinks you are disappointed with him."

"I should have figured it out," she tells him, and flicks a switch on the rice cooker. He flicks it back; Nyota, he has learned, has deplorable tastes in food and wishes her rice to crunch. No one else need be subjected to that. "Of course he's disappointed in me."

"No one could have discovered their plans before they executed them," he tells her. "Jim will tell you the same thing as soon as he is in any state to do so."

"You're sure he's not going to jump for it, right?" she asks, only half-joking.

"I think he will want revenge," Spock says. He hopes Jim will want revenge, though at the same time he hopes that Jim himself is not instrumental in getting that revenge. Jim's father cannot have been the only man ever killed by Narada; it would not make sense to expend that much effort for a single protester when it had not been tried before, and illogical to stop once they had gotten away with it so smoothly once. They will need to take some action, and the planning of it will be much safer than the execution. He knows Jim will be instrumental to both, and it disconcerts him,. worries him in a way he's unfamiliar with. "Go be with him, if you are so concerned."

"He doesn't want to see me."

"He never wants anything that he needs to have, you have told me so yourself," he says, and runs a knife under the tap. "Go. Tell him I will be fifteen minutes and that if he is so cold he can go inside and get a sweater."

~*~

Jim really doesn't want to see anyone but Spock. Spock is all calm and quiet and not angry at him, and is apparently cooking him things which he is not at all prepared to deal with.

He kind of especially doesn't want to see Uhura who comes up behind him and locks her arms around his shoulders before pressing her face into his back.

"I'm sorry," she murmurs. She has nothing to be sorry for and he still doesn't know how to apologize to her for the things that are his fault. He can't imagine what this conversation is going to look like and he'd very much prefer not to be involved in it.

"You do know I'm the guy, right?"

"Whatever, you love it when I'm the dom," she says, and he can feel her smirking into his spine. "Spock says you're not going to kill yourself."

"You trust Spock?"

"You do," she tells him, and it's true. "That's good enough for me. And, Jim, I should have listened better, should have figured out it was never that easy with anyone who didn't want to be seen."

"I should have known to tell you to look," he mutters, to his shoes.

"Yeah," she says, finally. "Maybe can it be a little bit everyone's fault, right now. 'Cause it sure as hell can't be just yours. You're good, but you're really not that good." It doesn't make him feel better, but it doesn't make him feel worse and there's not much he's asking for. "What do we do next?"

"Do I have to know?" he asks, because he doesn't really, he's done all the things he was supposed to do. He knows he's supposed to do something more, but he doesn't know what, yet. He doesn't know how to start to think about it because he keeps running into this huge black block of you fucked this up and you never deserved it anyway that he mostly doesn't know how to get around.

Uhura squeezes his shoulders, once, and then spins him around. "Yeah, Captain, you do," she says. " So figure it out, but first call your father and tell him you're OK and he'll tell you he still loves you and it will be fine. And then you can go and kick some ass, OK?"

"Your plans are always deceptively simple sounding," he says, and it's still more his fault, but she's got the look in her eyes that she had when she told him he didn't get to call her by her full name, and arguing with that is just stupid. Besides, he kind of wants to believe her, even if she's wrong. "And he's my stepfather."

"He doesn't think about it like that," she says, which is true. Jim knows it's true, but he also knows that shit like that can change. "Call him before he drives us all crazy."

"Are - is everyone holding up OK?" It's something he should have asked a couple hours ago, and at the thought that he hadn't his head sinks onto her shoulder. She runs her hands through his hair and he can imagine her grinning, thinks she must be.

"Well, you know, I think the child cried, which could be a suggestion for you. You could have cathartic crying right here, right now, and I would not blame you. Also, Spock has stopped trying to even pretend he's not head over fucking heels for you."

"I maybe told him to stop." He always figured she'd kill him when she found out, but she doesn't look like she's going to. And maybe he'll get really lucky and he'll have told her before Spock did and Spock'll at least be in more trouble (what they're supposed to be telling people is still unclear to him, and he's still too busy with so much else that he can't fucking think about that too). "Not that's it's - that."

"He's cooking for you," she says. "Right now, he is in the kitchen, cooking for you. Leonard's letting him - Leonard McCoy is letting someone prepare you food without instructions, which is I think how he gives his blessing. And Spock is cooking for you, and you are letting him. So I think it's exactly that, if 'that' means that you're so in love you can't see straight so you're willing to eat whatever the hell it is he's making. But you can't admit that because you're you, so you need me to tell you so. " She pushes him back and looks into his eyes, and then nods as if she's decided something. "Also, later, when we are all on dry land and this mess is cleaned up and we're all significantly more stable, there will be a punishment for not telling me that last night. Or, you know, whenever this started."

"You think this is going to get fixed?" he asks her, and he knows exactly why there's so much hanging on her answer. Uhura had made him work for her respect. Made him work really fucking hard, so it means something that he keeps it. To everyone else he's the fucking captain, and you listen to the captain. Uhura could give a fuck. She listens to Jim, when she thinks he deserves it, and she respects him enough to give him a chance when she thinks he's being an idiot. He needs to keep that.

"I know we'll fix it," she tells him. "You loved Red too much to let it go any other way, and so did the rest of us. Take the night, figure out you and let Spock help, for fuck's sake, and then I'll see you in the morning and we can start making this better, OK?" He nods, and he's not choked up because he hasn't cried sober since he was eleven, but he's feeling something huge and frightening for her that he's always associated with Chris.

~*~

Spock only knows how to prepare three dishes, but he knows that the stir fry he makes is borderline acceptable when he is able to use the aroma to help McCoy convince Pavel prepare himself a meal. Spock feels oddly accomplished at having done this, though the feeling does not last long as once Pavel is happily settled, Spock gets pulled into McCoy's office and threatened.

Well, perhaps threatened is too explicit a word. McCoy communicates his idea of a possible future and tries to be menacing while he does it.

"You know he's for shit at relationships, right?" McCoy says, and Spock contemplates, briefly, feigning ignorance, but he decides that it will most likely not work, and it would be futile to try. "He's going to break your heart - provided you have one - and he's not going to know he did and you are going to have to leave, and then it will all be terrible for weeks. Jim's invested in you, and there's going to be no talking him out of it, so now the only hope I've got is that you haven't gone crazy yet and I can talk some damn sense into you."

"I am very concerned about allowing you to continue as ship's physician if you believe there is as chance that I do not have a heart."

"Figure of speech," McCoy snaps.

Spock doesn't know how to respond to the rest of what McCoy has said. From what he's gleaned of Jim's relationship history, he does know that things won't necessarily end well for them, no matter what choices they make at some point in the future when their relationship (or lack thereof) is the most immediate thing happening in either of their lives. He finds that, at least today - and for the past eight days, but that was probably more about the fact that it has been nearly a year since he last had a regular sexual partner - he does not care. Spock is perhaps defined by his worrying and yet he finds that Jim is something he cannot worry about. Jim is there now and needs Spock now and it seems some great presumption to think very far beyond that. He will give what he has now, and that is all he finds himself capable of doing. He will continue doing so until the opportunity is no longer there, and then he will regret its passing. He can't explain why, he certainly can't defend it and he can't see a way to speak about anything he feels or anything they have done with the always-oppositional McCoy. A small, vindictive part of him also feels that it is both none of McCoy's concern and if McCoy is going to make it one then that should be a problem which it falls to Jim to resolve.

"Perhaps, Doctor," he says finally, because it's the only thing that he is certain of knowing in this entire mess of Jim and Red and this ship, "I cannot be talked out of it, either."

"Well, damn," says McCoy and eyes him exactly the way Nyota does every time she teases him about Jim. "Nyota put the fear of god into you about breaking his delicate little heart already, didn't she?"

"If you mean to ask if we discussed my relationship with the captain, then no, we have not."

"Take care of him," McCoy says, finally. "He has no fucking idea, but there are a lot of people who will do a lot of really awful things to you if you don't. She'll tell you the same. Go, his dinner'll get cold. And try to get him to sleep, I won't drug him 'cause now he'll just wake up mad but he could use some rest before he goes off half-cocked tomorrow."

"We do not know what -"

"Jim's the one in charge of coming up with it. It'll work, but it'll be crazy and probably also dangerous."

Spock leaves, feeling like he has been handed some sort of challenge. Feeling, for once, like it is a test that might be difficult for him. But - as always, with tests in school and with the challenges presented by his work, by Jim, by the very nature of Spock's own personality - as if he will be able, eventually, to pass it.

~*~

Jim spends the night sitting on the deck, starting curled beneath a blanket and ending with Spock's arm around him under the blanket while Spock gets probably as close as he's ever gotten to cursing another person out.

"It has been at least three hours since I have felt the toes on my left foot," Spock informs him. He's been pulling Jim closer for hours and Jim's actually not sure he could get closer. He still wants to be. Everyone else left him to Spock's tender mercies after Bones motherhenned them into bed, and now he's pacing the hall so they stay there. And has forgotten that Jim and Spock exist or something, maybe. Jim doesn't know, he's just glad not to be on the receiving end of Bones' earnest medical advice when really all he wants to do is sit right here and have a really nice nervous breakdown and maybe some hot chocolate if he can persuade Spock that he's still capable of standing.

"You are such a sissy, seriously," Jim tells him.

"I grew up in Arizona," Spock argues. "It does not get this cold there. Ever."

"Your dad had a posting in fucking Russia, that's gotta be colder." At maybe about midnight they decided that there was no point in trying to talk about what had happened. They'd made out for a while, but even that got frustrating when there was really no way anyone could get naked and Jim was skittish about the first move, and Spock's hands were everywhere but it was like he didn't know the next step. Jim would've maybe thought he was a virgin if it hadn't been for Bones' sexual history slip, which thank god, because in what Uhura will probably call Jim's delicate state, he's not entirely sure he could have handled that knowledge. At all.

They'd have been fucking, on the open deck, right now, he's almost entirely certain.

"We were only there in the summer," Spock says. "And had we been there in the winter, I can only assume my parents might have allowed me to go indoors in the night when the risk of frostbite was not so much a risk as a guarantee."

"You do not have frostbite, even a little bit, but come here," Jim says, and shifts and wriggles so it's Spock under his arms instead of him under Spock's. He realizes that when they're curled under a blanket anyway, it doesn't make much of a difference, but it might make Spock feel a little better, maybe. Hell, it makes Jim feel colder, but, no, that's actually because the blanket has slipped off.

At least now he can feel the cold and he's thinking about how at some point he's going to have to make Spock go outdoors in Alaska in just a t-shirt, instead of all bundled up and ridiculous, and maybe teach him the meaning of really fucking cold. He feels - well, he doesn't feel better. He still feels a little bit like someone took out something important from his chest with an ice-cream scoop and tossed it into the sea.

He also feels like he's diving to get it back.

He feels like he could call Chris in the morning and apologize and talk about next steps, and he feels like maybe when he's got visual on Gracie he could go inside (Spock says maybe forty-five minutes, if they're lucky, and he's learned to trust Spock's math without many questions). He feels like there's a tomorrow and there's still something next and that came faster that he'd thought it would.

But the worst things, Jim knows, are never as bad as you think they'll be. He's thought his world was ending a lot of times and it never has, and he pushes through it and he waits for it to be morning because it's cliched and it's stupid, but it's always gonna come, and he doesn't necessarily have to be standing when it does, he just has to be breathing.

Sometimes, they stop talking or touching or eating or whatever for a few minutes and he ends up thinking about it all too much and then he has to settle back against Spock and remember to breathe when Spock does, and Spock seems to get it and waits it out, patiently.

"You could go inside if you wanted to," he adds, suddenly, because he's started to rehash what Spock said last to find something they could talk about so he doesn't start to freak out again, or start to plan because it can't be time for that yet. It should have been immediate, but the Kobayashi Maru can't go faster than they can and now Uhura's doing her best to jam the signals from Gracie and George until they can get there. It's probably safer for them, and they are technically still doing research which does involve seeing whales. And, well, yes, it'll probably make him feel exponentially better.

There's this small part of him that's pretty sure that Nero's made whatever the fuck his point is and now they're safe. So he has tonight before he has to do anything. The empty time should drive him crazy, he should be pacing somewhere and trying to work out what to do next, but instead he just feels frozen, but not stiff. Like he's - there was some stupid movie that his brother watched, when Sam was maybe six. There were people stuck in slowed-down time. They spilled drinks or something and even at four Jim had realized that it all made no fucking sense. But those people had looked like they were maybe moving through jell-o, and that's how he feels. Except it doesn't feel absurd because it's real and this, right now, is when time is a little slower and he knows it's not enough time to get over anything, but it's enough time to get better.

"I do not want to," Spock tells him, and then reconsiders. "I do want to, but I do not think it would be best to leave you alone at this time." Jim doesn't really get why everyone thinks he's a fucking flight risk, and he'd have ripped Bones's head off for it at least four hours of condescension ago. But Spock's not condescending, or not really - he's something else, and that something else makes it so Jim isn't thinking about how to pay Spock back. Spock talks like it's not about not leaving Jim alone so Jim won't do something stupid, but like it's not about leaving Jim alone because Spock likes taking care of him. It's nice.

"I'm sorry about your toes," Jim says, after a pause in which he pulls Spock just a little closer and the blanket just a little tighter. "Even if I do think you're full of shit."

~*~

Spotting Gracie is like - it's not quite like a release it's more like being finally, finally relieved after months of isolation, and she breaches just next to the ship like she knows that he's been waiting for her and he can't help but think that she does, somehow. And yeah, so maybe he is sometimes one of those guys who has a religious experience every time he gets near them but she's his girl and today he needs this. And there's this little part of him that would make Spock - Spock - die laughing that thinks maybe she needed him a little bit, right now. Jim doesn't think that his babies think like he does, but he thinks they've got to feel and maybe if she's felt Red dying she can feel something about that. He doesn't know how he got to be this guy.

His reaction is not maybe the most emotionally balanced one he's ever had. There's a few minutes of gripping the railing and doing something really nasty to his hands that's probably going to end in arthritis, and then he - well, he didn't actually know that jump was ever a literal term, but he guesses he kind of makes it one, because he's not entirely sure how he got Spock pressed up against the wall, but he knows that his feet didn't really touch the ground between here and there and also that it feels fucking wonderful.

This feels new, pressing into Spock's mouth and taking control and tangling their tongues and trying to swallow every moan and remember every touch because they're all amazing. He steers Spock's hands to his hips because that's where he wants them and then he keeps them there because he wants to explore and he can't when Spock's trying to do the same thing.

He's got one hand up the back of Spock's shirt, exploring smooth skin and what feels like a mole just between his shoulder blades that Jim can already taste - all salt and sweat and Spock and amazing, and he'd be pressed up over Spock and he'd be still because he wouldn't want to leave that one spot, but it'd be like fire at the base of his spine trying to get him to move, and Spock wild - no, Spock would never be wild. Spock composed under him but gasping and moaning and maybe eventually begging if Jim could get himself to stay still for that long and it would be God, it would be so, so good like that.

It's thinking about that that gets him riding the leg Spock somehow got between his own, and moving down from Spock's mouth - which takes effort, fuck, Spock tastes like heaven and a bit like the tea he had in a thermos a while ago - to Spock's neck where he's not sweating because they've only maybe been like this for minutes but he can feel the rhythm of Spock gasping for breath against his tongue and it's so, so good.

"If you wish to continue," and here, Spock's voice fucking hitches, and it's maybe the hottest thing Jim's ever heard and he's pretty sure they can't continue because the second he gets his hands on any more of Spock's bare skin he's going to fucking come and he doesn't even know why. He's not even sure he felt like this when he was thirteen and he got his hands under a girl's shirt for the first time. "If you wish to continue, Jim, we must move inside."

"Why?"

"I am not an exhibitionist," Spock tells him, and then pulls him back up to kiss him again.

"But later?"

"We will discuss it," Spock says, but Jim's pretty sure Spock actually means 'no', but then Spock is somehow out from under him and grabbing his hand and pulling him towards the staircase and Jim ceases to care if he doesn't get to have public sex for the next - well, a part of him that is apparently a teenaged girl is suggesting lifetime. That part is stupid and he doesn't want to think about exactly how much of him it comprises right now.

They make it to the first landing before they're grinding up against each other. Jim's not sure what changed or what broke and he's still hurting, but it's like that's a corner of his mind that's just been overwhelmed by this which is so, so much more and he cannot fucking take it, so this time he's the one who pulls away because Spock's not the kind of person to hold something over his head, but Jim's pretty sure he couldn't take it if he had to know that his first time with Spock he came in his pants in the hallway. And he also knows that Spock would always remember and would find ways to allude to it during otherwise normal conversation and he doesn't know how he got to know Spock so well but he likes it.

Likes it like the feeling of Spock's hand in his, or the feeling of Spock finally pressing him down into the bed, or the way that Spock sighs when Jim shifts a little against him just like that.

He likes that they have a whole discussion about getting naked because clearly they had some different plans for how that was going to go. He likes that he tosses his clothes on the floor and gets to lie back and jerk himself and put on a fucking show for Spock while Spock's folding his clothes and Spock's hands are shaky, halted and it is so, so clear that the only thing he's thinking about is Jim, and then there's the feel of Spock's tongue on him and Spock settling between his legs and it's the only thing he can think of and it's maybe the only thing he ever wants to see again.

Except then Spock stops which is a fucking sin, and pulls up so he's looming over Jim and goes to nip and bite at Jim's ears, which normally Jim thinks is kind of weird but right now it's working and then Spock's talking and maybe, OK, maybe Jim's so far gone that he should have missed it if it had been anyone else's voice.

"I want you inside me," Spock pants, though, and his voice is all rough from having Jim's cock down his throat and there is no fucking way Jim could ever have not heard that, could ever have not registered it by rearing up and pinning Spock to the bed and kissing him until he couldn't breathe and grinding down against him and wondering why the hell he wasn't coming already because even just the idea of it was quietly pulling him to pieces.

~*~

It will occur to Spock, later, that it was presumptuous of him to think that Jim would have condoms and lubrication easily accessible when he had had no idea, embarking, that he would be engaging in sexual relations before they were in port in Hawaii.

It will occur to him even after that that he need not feel guilty for the assumption because Jim would have taken it as a compliment.

When he is writhing on two of Jim's fingers and so lost in sensation that he could not beg even if he had ever been inclined to begging, nothing occurs to him at all. He mouths at Jim's shoulder only because it is the closest skin and not especially because he had thought about the broad stretch of them. Eventually, though, his mouth falters on Jim's skin until he is merely resting it on Jim's collarbone and Jim is curling and scissoring his fingers and Spock cannot breathe and he doesn't care.

And then Jim's pushing in a third finger and Jim is moaning, which Spock cannot quite understand since Jim is so carefully holding himself above Spock, barely touching him at all since Jim is receiving no real, direct stimulation - and Spock had thought, until Jim, that he was not attracted by strength, would have thought it would have been the bird-delicate bones of Nyota's wrist and not the tight-bound strength of Jim's arms that would have enthralled him. He tries to pull Jim down on top of him, thinking of pressing them together, the infinitely arousing weight of Jim's body on his, but Jim shakes his head, wordless when he tries. Jim presses a wet kiss to Spock's cheek, as if soothing the sting of some imagined rejection before he places his hand on Spock's waist and guides Spock until Spock is straddled over Jim's arousal, looking down at Jim who seems calm, who smiles up at him and presses a wet kiss to Spock's wrist where it comes to rest by Jim's head.

"You've done this before, right?" Jim says, and his voice is rougher than Spock has ever heard it, and then he's letting go of Spock, withdrawing to grab for a condom and Spock is trembling with the effort of being even so far from Jim, of waiting patiently for what he knows is a necessary precaution.

He wants so very badly for it not to be. He wants to be the only one Jim does this with and he wants them to touch in as many ways as possible. The small barrier is practical, and he knows that he will not think of it in the act, but it bothers him now, like something small biting at the back of his mind. This is not his to keep, not yet, perhaps not ever.

"Yes," he says, answering in the general instead of the specific. He has had intercourse before, with a man, even. He has not done this. He does, though, understand the basic mechanics of it and there is some small part of him that says there is a reason not to give Jim the power of the knowledge that he is the only one who has done this to Spock, the only one who has ever made him feel this way, or want this.

And then he is taking the condom from Jim, rolling it onto him - and how is this the first time he has touched Jim like this when it feels as if this is perhaps where his hands have always belonged, where his body fit better than it does anywhere else.

There is an awkwardness, in trying to figure out how they will be together. Spock tries to guide Jim into him as Jim bucks his hips, almost as if it was involuntary. Jim tries to kiss Spock as Spock is trying to pull away from him to get - some perspective, he thinks, he needs. The fit is just slightly wrong for a moment, and Spock has to wonder if the rightness of everything up until now has been only momentary. If the rest of this were not the same simple flow of their bodies together, he would not mind. But the loss of that simplicity requires an adjustment, almost. But then there is a pause and Spock feels drawn out of the moment - enough to wonder what he must look like, if he could possibly be as tantalizing as Jim under him when he is only himself and nothing like the gold of Jim's skin and the burning blue of his eyes. Jim is laughing, though, and taking Spock's hips into his hands and maneuvering, and Spock would feel offended if Jim did not look so lovely underneath him, did not look like temptation embodied and was not something more than beautiful.

"Oh," Spock sighs, when Jim has guided himself in, and he did not mean to say that, did not mean to make any noise at all, but there is just the tip of Jim, and it's a stretch like nothing he's felt before, but it is Jim and so it is so, so good and he is pushing down, because there had been a look in Jim's eyes as if he were both restraining himself from movement and savoring the moment all at once and Spock had realized they could have stayed like that, still, forever. But Spock cannot savor, he needs - he wants, perhaps, but it feels like need - more than this.

Then Jim is seated in him, and Spock is touching Jim everywhere, because he seems to no longer have control of his hands, Jim starts talking, and that is Spock's own undoing.

"I wanted this," Jim says, softly, beginning to move, and it hurts, but Jim's hips are shifting as if Jim is looking for something, "I looked at you that first day and I wanted this - but then you were so, God, Spock, you were so you and I wanted this so much more, but then I thought I couldn't because I want to keep you. OK? I want to keep you and I want to freeze your fucking toes off and then I want to come in here and warm you up and holy hell, yes, baby, like that, OK, just move with me a little bit and I promise, it's gonna be so good for you."

"Do not call me baby," Spock answers, because he does not know how to respond to that, is vaguely impressed with himself for having the ability to speak and the endearment has never suited him.

"Call you whatever the fuck I want to, sweetheart," Jim tells him, but Spock notes that at least he listened in his own way. And then Jim is shifting him just once more and Spock does lose the ability to speak, at all, and he must be making noise but he can only hear the rush of air past his ears and sometimes Jim is grunting, sighing, swearing, and sometimes it is his name, and it's only - it's only a few embarrassing minutes later and he is climaxing with barely a touch of Jim's hand.

He cannot remember Jim's climax, though he thinks he would like to see Jim like that, so very undone.

He remembers Jim whispering to him and thrusting up into him during his orgasm, and he remembers the rush and Jim quietly pulling out and settling onto his side, a parabola as Spock is a vertical equation next to him.

Jim has left him space, and Spock finds he does not want it so he reaches out to Jim, one hand on Jim's shoulder and pulls him, so that his body is resting mostly over Spock's. Jim is pliable and bends his body to fit Spock's, and the weight of him on Spock is soothing, as if it is keeping him grounded.

He falls asleep nearly immediately, Jim pressed up against his side, breathing hotly into his neck.

~*~

Jim hates the morning after, as a general rule. If he liked sex even slightly less, he would be so overwhelmed by hatred for the morning after that he would become a monk and fulfill all the fantasies Bones has ever had and it'd be awesome, for Bones. The thing is, when it's someone he knows (so, OK, lately that means when it's the damn marine biologist) that means there's no quick escape and it's all going to go to hell and he just has to wait for it. When it's whoever he picked up the night before, he's got a pretty good chance of knowing their name, but getting it wrong is possibly the worst thing he ever does to people and he fucking hates when that happens. And then there's the whole getting-out-of-somewhere-strange and he used to have to call a cab, which was fine because cabbies pretty much professionally mock people doing the walk of shame and he feels like he's brightened someone's day. But now, mostly, he has to call Uhura, or if he can't get her it's Bones and it's not very nice (but better than Sulu who likes to leave him to find his own way home). So yes, Jim hates the morning after so very much. But Jim really likes sex, so he hasn't stopped doing it just to avoid that and he probably never will.

Sex with Spock, he thinks, was fairly awesome. Maybe not the best sex he's ever had; top ten, though. Top five. Maybe not worth the morning after, but there's this chance that it was that's got Jim putting off opening his eyes in case it wasn't.

He does open them, though and Spock is sitting next to him, with a mug of coffee.

Top three.

"You made coffee?"

"Pavel cannot sleep," Spock tells him, and then his hand makes some sort of aborted gesture and he adds, "I am pleased that you could."

Jim kind of doesn't want to let go of the coffee to take Spock's hand, but he also thinks that he wants Spock to know that he gets to touch Jim now, because top-three sex on a first try is pretty good and they are going to do that again. Possibly, a very small part of Jim contributes, until Spock is the entire top ten. Keeping that in mind, Jim reaches out for Spock's hand and puts it in his own before sipping his coffee.

"You're all clothed," he grumbles. It's not fair. Spock should always be naked.

"It is the morning. Well, it was morning when we fell asleep, now it is midafternoon. It is, though, time to be awake," Spock tells him and other people (Jim, but he's pretty sure also normal people, or at least Sulu) would've been lascivious about that. Spock is not. "You should dress as well, the Senator has called eight times already and I believe in his last phone call he told Nyota that she was dead to him. He is very anxious about you, and I believe he plans to fire the next person who tells him he cannot speak to you. You have things to do."

Yesterday comes crashing down, really suddenly, and it's not pretty and Jim's almost impressed with himself for not crying and only pulling Spock down so he can kiss him and get the rhythm of his breathing. And, right, that's why he doesn't hate his life. Because today is the ninth day after he kissed Spock and yesterday was maybe the worst day ever and he doesn't know how to fix this and he spent the entire night trying to remember what it was like to be all right, and he never figured it out. Spock kisses back, quietly yielding for a minute, and then does pull away.

"You will give Doctor McCoy some sort of fit if you do not demonstrate soon that I have not, in fact, killed you."

"With sex?"

"He last suggested strangling," and Jim should make some sort of cheap shot about bondage - because holy God does it come up a lot with Spock, which is both weird and intriguing - but instead he just keeps resting their foreheads together.

"I'm filthy," Jim says, instead, aiming for seductive and honestly not entirely sure whether he gets there. Spock kisses him and makes this soft noise against his lips right before he does that might have been a laugh, on someone else. On Spock it's just sort of bizarrely charming and also makes Jim want to lick into his mouth, except Spock is not letting that happen, because he goes all steely and determined and moves away.

"You really do have things to do," he reminds him. "And Jim? I did not say yesterday. I am sorry for your loss."

And that's the thing that gets Jim out of bed and moving, because he did lose something, and he wants something in return.

~*~

There's a part of Chris that regrets that this is his life. He hates that it's the phone on his desk waking him up because that means he didn't go home last night, and so neither did Number One. That means that Chris will have no coffee because he doesn't quite know how to procure it and she won't do it unless she's asked, and he won't ask her because he knows she has every right to be unhappy with him.

"Pike," he answers, not even really bothering to raise his head. It's got to be - fuck, how long was he asleep for?

"Hey, Chris." It's Jim which is - more than surprising. He'd thought it was going to be fucking days before he heard from him without having to get someone to wrestle him to the phone. Yeah, Jim's really for shit at staying angry with Chris and he goes looking for reassurance as soon as he's out of his own head, but this was a really big fucking deal, and Chris had been sure he wasn't going to be speaking to Jim until Jim had drunk it all off at the seediest bar he could find on the nearest landmass. Not that he hadn't been calling every half hour anyway, just to check that nobody needed him.

"Jim," because he wants to yell at him and he want to apologize and he wants to check on him and that's all competing in his throat, so there's pretty much nothing to say but the kid's name.

"I'm, um, I'm sorry I didn't call?" Jim suggests, and it's sounds like there's just as much going on in him, so Chris makes a humming sort of noise of assent. "And, Chris, I'm sorry about Red. I had - Uhura's going to send you some pictures, and you can work with that. And we're on Gracie now, and I don't know what the fuck to do about George, but his signal's been fine, though if that means anything is kind of unclear to me, but I think it has to mean he's fine right now, and maybe we can go between for a couple weeks. Kobayashi Maru's fucking gone, though. Uhura's losing her shit because she can't find it, but she thinks maybe the signal we used to be getting was one they wanted us to get - she's working on it. We're gonna figure out what to do, and we'll do it soon but Chris -"

"Jim," he says, and he doesn't really know what else to say. That Jim's even starting to apologize means he's lost it in a really major kind of way. Jim used to - God, he remembers when he used to let Winona call, when he thought maybe Jim was just staying with him for a few months - Jim would spend hours apologizing to her for leaving, for fucking making Frank hit him. It was this thing of Jim's, when he didn't know what to do, he just took it all on himself. Chris never knew how to make it go away, and he's always been ashamed that he hadn't ripped the phone out of Jim's hands or held him or parented or something instead of leaving the damn room and waiting outside in the hopes that eventually he'd be needed.

It's never been aimed at Chris before, though.

"There's no way anyone saw this coming," he says, "not me and not you and the only blame is on the bastards that did it."

"You gave them to me to take care of," Jim says, stubborn, and then there's some muttering in the background - he'd think Uhura, only now he remembers he sent her to bed after the last time he called, and it's too deep for that.

"Who've you got with you?" he asks, finally, because he's too old to ram his head against this brick wall and he always wanted to be something better for Jim than Winona was. Listening to Jim apologize just makes him sick and tired and reminds him that maybe he can't fix this part of Jim and that he'll never get his kid to be as OK as he might have been if Chris had had him always.

"Spock," Jim answers, "he made me breakfast."

"Did you eat it?" Jim doesn't eat when he's unhappy, and the he won't notice he's hungry for days. It's why Chris is always checking. When Jim was in school, he used to be able to tell when it was a bad week because he'd need to go more than two days without going for groceries.

"It was vegetarian. But I'm eating it, I'm eating it," there's the sound of throat clearing at the other end of the line and then a door closing. "Kicked Spock out," Jim explains, and Chris wonders that he's got Spock obeying his hand gestures at this point. "I want to do something, Chris."

"You are doing something, you're eating breakfast. Thank Spock for me."

"That's not what I'm saying." Chris has this moment of wondering what he'd do if it were anyone else on the Enterprise, or if he'd argued that Narada hadn't been culpable for George's death, and finds it doesn't really matter. What matters is he's going to keep Jim safe. It's the least he can do.

"We'll send out the pictures, Jim, but this is not a children's movie where you heroically save the damn whales. This is our real life, I can make this look bad and I can get the Kobayashi Maru inspected next time they go to port somewhere half-civilized, but that's all I can do."

"It's not all I can do," Jim says, "it's not all I'm gonna do. We'll send you the pictures later today. And Chris?"

"What?"

"I'm really sorry."

Chris isn't sure if Jim's apologizing for what he's done or what he's about to do, and both ideas tear him apart in equal measure. And then he's just furious that Jim hung up on him and sets to composing an email that says so, which he nevers sends because he is, in fact, smarter than that.

~*~

It's not, precisely, a council of war, because that would be ridiculous. That's just what Scotty's calling it. And, OK, yes, what Jim's calling it in his head, but not out loud, because even if he's maybe not taking this as badly as he should have (the child, for one, is looking at him like he should be a weeping heap on the floor of the bridge and not just leaning into Spock more than he might have done if he'd never had his hands on Spock's junk and if he wasn't feeling like maybe he was going to need something solid to grab onto at any given moment).

"Full disclosure," he says, because he knows he'll never feel right if he doesn't. They're all in the galley because it holds them all - his back is pressed up against the sink and he's got Spock on one side of him and McCoy on the other. The child handed him coffee and Uhura handed him a six-page long memo on what she had done wrong and how they could have all stopped it and then she'd kissed him on the cheek and told him that he shouldn't beat himself up so much about stuff when he could blame her, because she was a stronger person than him. "I'm probably not going to tell Chris about anything we talk about here, so if you really, really want for him not to kill you, then you can leave now."

"He says I'm dead to him anyway," Uhura tells him , from where she's settled on the floor by the small table.

Sulu's next to her, and he just gives Jim this look that screams I followed you this far, moron and then looks away.

"Someone's got to mind you," Bones says, and he sounds exasperated but he looks like a kid going on an adventure or something, except maybe grimmer.

"No one else'll be able to work on my bairns so he can't give me the sack," Scotty informs them all. This probably true; after two and a half years of Scotty Jim's fairly certain the engines no longer even resemble whatever they were manufactured to be.

Pavel looks around at all of them, and then nods once, and mutters something in Russian that Jim probably doesn't want to understand.

Spock maybe presses a little closer to Jim (they can pretend they're just in close quarters all they want, but even Scotty's kind of giving Jim the eye for it).

It sounds like a big moment, it feels like it should be building up to something. But at the same time, this is his crew and he knows them, and he knew they would probably come with him, because they're amazing and they're not blaming him; it's this stupidly warm feeling that he's pretty sure might be all that's keeping him running.

Bones nudges him when the pause goes on a beat too long, and then again when it goes a beat past that.

"So," Jim says, finally, "ideas?"

At that point, Scotty has one about blowing the Kobayashi Maru up using only underwater volcanoes, something that sounds like it'd happen in a comic book and Scotty could probably make work. It sounds a little appealing, but Jim's pretty sure murder is not the answer. The rest of it is - not lackluster, his crew's brilliant and they try to find what he's looking for. It's just not coming to anybody. Jim's trying not to get frustrated, because he should be the one to fucking figure this out, but it normally doesn't take him this long to get there.

"Uhura, find out where they are, I don't care how you do it. We're going to want to know where the ship is and once we do, if they get within twenty miles of George, I want to know about it, I don't care when it is or what I'm doing," he says, later, when they're exhausted and they're staring dully at appliances more than they're talking.

"Might want to ask Spock's opinion on that," McCoy mumbles; Jim glares at him, and Bones glares right back. "You are not quiet, Jim."

He hadn't even known Spock could blush, or that he could actually figure out how to laugh again this quickly. Sulu hugs Bones for it and Uhura smiles at Spock and then gives Jim this look like he's possibly dirt on her shoe.

"If you break him, Captain, I am going to find real marine biologist nuns and I am going to have the senator hire all of them. And then we'll all quit and you can ride around on a boat of marine biologist nuns and it will be nothing like porn. Are we clear?"

"You fucking told me to," he informs her, and he doesn't know how they got this off track, and they still don't have a (feasible) plan, but there's his crew in his galley and Spock beside him looking like he's never been this offended before in his life, and there're still some really good things in the world.

**Author's Note:**

> So, back at the dawn of time, I said I was going to write an epic AU in which Jim and Spock save the whales. This is that fic. It was betaed by leupagus who says I'm not supposed to thank her anymore, but seriously, you guys, she did so much for this fic, and also is the reason it was very nearly called Not Exactly Free Willy or The Captain's Wife. Mostly it's not called that, because, as she pointed out to me, Jim? Is always the wife. Anyway, I have had (and am having) so much fun writing this and I really hope you all enjoy reading it; please let me know if you have (or really, if you haven't, concrit is always welcome, it is why I'm here).


End file.
